Annals of Nature

App推荐-英阅阅读器
Art
Books
Comment
Crossword
Curation Dept.
Fiction
In Miniature
Letter from Budapest
Musical Events
Onward and Upward with the Arts
Poems
Profiles
Shouts & Murmurs
Sketchbook
Tables for Two
The Current Cinema
The Theatre
Annals of Nature

Swamps Can Protect Against Climate Change, If We Only

Let Them
By Annie Proulx

Content

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

It can be hell finding one’s way across an extensive boggy moor—the

partially dry, rough ground and the absence of any landmarks let the eye
rove helplessly into the monotype distance. Everything undulates, the rise
and fall share the same muted palette, and the senses dull. But a swamp is
different: in it, in addition to water, there are trees and shrubs, just as reeds
and rushes are the hallmarks of a marsh. Although water and squelch are
everywhere in a swamp, there are landmarks—downed trees or jagged
stumps, a tenanted heron nest, occasional islands of high-ground hardwood
stands, called “hammocks” in the South. Yet the swamp traveller goes not in
a straight line but slouches from quaking island to thick tussock to slippery,
half-submerged log. Even with G.P.S. technology, big swamps are places to
get lost, and in the past many people with a reason to melt out of sight—
Native Americans threatened out of their territory, runaway slaves, Civil
War army deserters, moonshiners, and bloody-handed murderers—have
hidden in them. For a few seconds, I once considered hiding in a swamp
myself.

When I was ten years old, my family lived in a rented house in Rhode
Island. Saturdays were free time, and I sometimes went to a nearby swamp.
A fishermen’s path circled the swamp. Far out in the water stood the
unreachable hulk of a dead tree—branchless, tall, white, and with a large
hole near the top. I had somewhere read that great blue herons nested in such
snags, and that in one swamp a man had brought a ladder, placed it against a
tree, and climbed up to look into a heron nest. The heron stabbed him in the
eye as he came level with the nest, and the man, his eye and brain pierced,
fell dead from the ladder. I wanted to see if there was a heron nest in this
local swamp’s dead tree—perhaps even a live heron, perhaps even the
remains of a ladder, perhaps even a sun-bleached skull nearby. When I got to
the swamp, I saw a small raft and a pole lying on the bank. There was no
one around. I pushed the raft out into the tawny water, got on board, and
began poling toward the snag. I was halfway there when I heard furious
shouts and screams. Looking back, I saw the two worst boys at my school
jumping up and down on the bank and hurling futile clods of mud. I had
stolen their raft. After a quick look for a hiding place, I changed direction
and took an oblique route to the farthest shore, where I pole-vaulted onto
firm land, found the path, and rushed away from the scene of the crime. It
was some time before I noticed that I was still carrying the raft pole, and I
leaned it helpfully against a tree before continuing home.

Many modern Americans do not like swamps, herons or no herons, and

experience discomfort, irritation, bewilderment, and frustration when coaxed
or forced into one, except for a few, like my mother, for whom entering a
swamp was like plunging into a complex world of rare novelties. My
mother’s hero was Henry David Thoreau, the enigmatic New England
surveyor-naturalist-essayist. Thoreau has been called the patron saint of
swamps, because in them he found the deepest kind of beauty and interest.
He wrote of his fondness for swamps throughout his life, most feelingly in
his essay “Walking”: “Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were
proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden
that ever human art contrived, or else of a Dismal Swamp, I should certainly
decide for the swamp.” He went so far as to describe his dream house as one
with windows fronting on a swamp where he could see “the high blueberry,
panicled andromeda, lambkill, azalea, and rhodora—all standing in the
quaking sphagnum.”

Many people vaguely understand that wetlands cleanse the earth. In fact,
they are carbon sinks that absorb CO2, and they are unparalleled in filtering
out human waste, material from rotten carcasses, chemicals, and other
pollutants. They recharge underground aquifers and sustain regional water
resources, buffering the excesses of drought and flood. In aggregate, the
watery parts of the earth stabilize its climate.

Wooded swamps are at the end stage of a fen-bog-swamp succession,

legacies of the Ice Age, when the melt started the sequence by first creating
stupendously huge lakes. Lake Agassiz covered more than a hundred
thousand square miles of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, North Dakota,
and Minnesota. Lake Missoula covered about three thousand square miles of
what is now Montana; its repeatedly bursting ice dams and cataclysmic
floods spread through Idaho and Washington and created bizarre giant
ripples as the long-ago gushers scoured out the channelled scablands of
eastern Washington. The melt turned much of the North American continent
into wet ground, with long chains of swamps gouged by no-brakes glaciers
that plowed across the terrain. Burly new watercourses captured smaller
streams and made deltas and estuaries.

In the nineteenth century, the United States enlarged in a fever of land

acquisition: the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, involving eight hundred thousand
square miles from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, doubled the size of the
country; in 1819, the Adams-Onís Treaty added Florida and part of Oregon;
five hundred and twenty-five thousand square miles of Texas were annexed
in 1845; the Oregon Treaty, in 1846, enrolled the Pacific Northwest from
Northern California to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Great oceans and lakes
framed the country, and the interior roiled with tangles of rivers like
unspooling silver ribbons. All that territory had once held a wealth of
wetness—scientists have estimated that approximately two hundred and
twenty-one million sopping acres existed in the early seventeenth century,
much of it swamps—and two hundred years later many swamplands
remained. As the United States pushed its borders, its population leaped
from 7.2 million people in 1810 to 12.8 million by 1830, almost doubling in
twenty years. The welcoming arms of open immigration became the
hallmark of America, and that reputation lingers in global memory, despite
today’s more painfully stringent reality.

The original occupants of the continent knew the rivers and swamps, the
bogs and lakes, as they knew the terrain and one another. But for most
English settlers and European newcomers nature consisted of passive and
inanimate substances and situations waiting to be used to human advantage.
Preservation and care of nature were not what they had come for.

The first generations of overseas settlers concentrated on claiming the

easiest farmland near the shore and in the river valleys. To their mind, there
were no local resources. Everything had to be imported or reinvented. As
invaders, they had constant battle with Indigenous people who defied them.
It was not until the Revolutionary War ended and the Indian Wars devolved
into treaty-making that the population noticeably increased and a need for
more farmland brought settlers into the upland forests. The growing scarcity
of good farmland revived old stories of swamp and marsh drainage. Farmers
already knew that a wagonload of “muck” from a nearby swamp would
enrich the soil, renewing yields that had weakened over the years. In
addition, during the Civil War, moving heavy guns and personnel through
swamps was incredibly difficult; soldiers often resorted to laboriously
clearing bypass routes. One of the men wrote of wading through knee-deep
and deeper mud in North Carolina after the battle of First Gum Swamp:
“The brambles [were] thick and thorny, the water coffee-colored, alive with
creeping things, the air heavy with moisture and foul odors.” These
memories persisted. Across the country, the ongoing stories of vile
adventures in the muck made it clear to military, government, and citizenry
that something had to be done about the swamps so universally detested.
Everywhere there were horrendous mixtures of fen, bog, swamp, river, pond,
lake, and human frustration. This was a country of rich, absorbent wetlands
that increasingly no one wanted.

After a rainstorm, any curious child who drags a stick obliquely away from a
rivulet sees the rivulet forsake its original channel and follow the stick’s
trail; the stick dragger has discovered the principle of drainage. It is this
innate existential curiosity that has led humans to commit unthinking
malfeasances against the natural world. Farmers grew up with shovel in
hand ready to cut drainage ditches. The government was solidly on the side
of drainage to increase land area, in part for incoming immigrants. In 1849,
Congress passed the first of several swampland laws that turned federal
wetlands over to the individual states with the right to dispense those water-
sodden acreages for purposes of drainage. These laws perpetuated the myth
of endless land free for the taking, and showed an inability or an
unwillingness to observe changes in nature over the seasons and years.

By the nineteen-eighties, roughly half of America’s wetlands had been

wiped out. Aerial photography made wetland size estimates possible, and in
1990 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published a study showing that
since the sixteen-hundreds the country’s treasury of wetlands had shrivelled
to a hundred and three million acres, and that some states had lost almost all
their original wetlands.

The single-minded desire for more agricultural land linked to automation

and the transfer of field labor from human to machine, along with the
growing customer base of non-farming populations for cheap foods and
grains, has come with a terrible cost. Between 2004 and 2009, another sixty-
two thousand three hundred acres of wetlands disappeared to agricultural
interests and housing developers. And more continue to disappear because
of sediment-deposition patterns; fertilizer runoff; spilled and leaking
chemicals; increasing floods, storms, droughts, and fires; and today’s rising
sea level.

Rising sea level is both subtle and blatant: we hardly notice it until a storm
brings vast flooding. For example, at Naval Station Norfolk, in the Hampton
Roads region—a natural roadstead channel of deep water in Chesapeake
Bay, fed by the James, Nansemond, and Elizabeth Rivers—seawater is now
swelling up at an unprecedented rate. The environmental writer Jeff Goodell
visited the station and wrote, “There is no high ground on the base, nowhere
to retreat to. It feels like a swamp that has been dredged and paved over—
and that’s pretty much what it is.”

“I have not come to praise Caesar but to reassure the markets.”

Cartoon by Paul Noth

It is in and around wetlands that the greatest blossoming of biodiversity has

occurred—it is not too much to say that we owe our existence to this planet’s
wetlands, including fens, bogs, and swamps. Our wholesale destruction of
wetlands for the sake of a few decades of growing wheat, rice, soy, and palm
oil has been breathtakingly short-sighted. Once again, we are shocked into
recognition that most of us live only for the moment.
The great Southern coastal swamps of the United States were and are
treasures of the natural world. Some have been exploited and damaged
beyond recognition; some are still rich and wonderful, preserved as wildlife
refugia or parks. Visitors can share the amazement and delight of the
botanist William Bartram, whose exploratory travels in Georgia and Florida
between 1765 and 1776 yielded writings and drawings that show a wild,
tropical South—warily sensitive Seminoles, violent and crafty alligators,
exquisite unnamed flowers, masses of bayonet-like grasses, colossal black
oaks. Every fly-fisher will appreciate his description of the mayfly hatch:

Innumerable millions of winged beings, voluntarily verging on to

destruction, to the brink of the grave, where they behold bands of their
enemies with wide open jaws, ready to receive them. But . . . gay and
tranquil each meets his beloved mate in the still air, inimitably
bedecked in their new nuptial robes. What eye can trace them, in their
varied wanton amorous chaces, bounding and fluttering on the
odiferous air!

Bartram was the son of the Philadelphia Quaker John Bartram, who had
been appointed Botanist for the American Colonies by George III. John
Bartram made the country’s first botanical garden on his Philadelphia
property. Father and son often went on botanical expeditions together. One
such was to Georgia’s lower Altamaha, where in 1765 they first discovered
the Franklinia, in a sandhill bog. This small, beautiful tree is now extinct in
the wild but continues to delight American gardeners, who grow specimens
all descended from those few seeds collected by William Bartram on his
Georgia travels. Thinking of the Bartrams, I once planted the closely related
Stewartia in my garden, while I was living in Port Townsend, Washington; it
grew handsomely but did not flower during my time there.

A valuable medicinal plant was the Bartrams’ second find. “It grows twelve
or fifteen feet high,” William Bartram wrote, “with large panicles of pale
blue tubular flowers, specked on the inside with crimson.” This was
Pinckneya pubens, the Georgia “fever tree,” a natural source of quinine used
by Native Americans to treat tick fever, muscle cramps, parasites, and
malaria.
At times, the travels were dangerous or pestiferous, as when Bartram fell
asleep next to his campfire to enjoy “but a few moments, when I was
awakened and greatly surprised, by the terrifying screams of Owls in the
deep swamps around me . . . which increased and spread every way for
miles around, in dreadful peals vibrating through the dark extensive forests.”
This past spring, in New Hampshire, I heard amorous owls similarly
whooping and caterwauling in the woods. One of Bartram’s more admirably
descriptive passages pinpoints the belligerence of the “subtle greedy
alligator”:

Behold him rushing forth from the flags and reeds. His enormous body
swells. His plaited tail brandished high, floats upon the lake. The waters
like a cataract descend from his opening jaws. Clouds of smoke issue
from his dilated nostrils. The earth trembles with his thunder. When
immediately from the opposite coast of the lagoon, emerges from the
deep his rival champion. They suddenly dart upon each other. The
boiling surface of the lake marks their rapid course, and a terrific
conflict commences. They now sink to the bottom folded together in
horrid wreaths. The water becomes thick and discolored. Again they
rise. . . . Again they sink.

The American biologist and ornithologist Brooke Meanley, who died in

2007, knew intimately every swamp corner that the Bartrams had visited two
centuries earlier. He spent most of his professional life in the Southern
swamps. Born in Maryland in 1915, and educated at the University of
Maryland, Meanley worked as an ornithologist for the Department of the
Interior. In his work, he took thousands of pictures of swamp habitats and
birds—including many that no longer exist.

During the Second World War, he served for four years, and was stationed in
Georgia, rehabilitating returning soldiers with damaged bodies and psyches.
His way was to take the jittery men on hikes and bird walks through nearby
forests and swamps. One can only guess how many bird-watchers and
amateur naturalists found mental balance and lifelong interests in the natural
world through these expeditions. Certainly they learned from him that
cutting old-growth forests removed vital bird habitat.
Meanley’s years in and around the Southern water lands are encapsulated in
his book “Swamps, River Bottoms and Canebrakes.” I had never heard of
the Slovac Thicket until I read Meanley’s description: “For its size, the
fourteen-acre Slovac Thicket, located in the heart of the Grand Prairie near
Stuttgart, Arkansas, packed the most wildlife excitement per acre that I have
ever known.” It’s a good bet that a sky totally black with twenty million
birds, such as he saw and photographed that day, cannot now be seen.

Swamps and birds go together; when the swamp disappears, so do the birds.
The New World warblers (a.k.a. wood warblers), a group of about fifty small
passerine birds that migrate from South and Central America to the boreal
forests of Alaska and Canada, were Meanley’s favorites. Many are brightly
colored, and their complicated high-pitched songs are difficult to hear. They
flicker and flit through branches and reeds like sunlight on a windy day and
are a challenge to see. In a perfect world, a warbler can live for a decade, but
in the world of predatory house cats, wind turbines, and enormous glass
buildings a warbler is lucky to live two years. Meanley found that the
bottomlands of the I’On Swamp, in South Carolina, were a choice habitat for
the Bachman’s warbler, once the seventh most common migratory bird,
annually flying up from Cuba to breed in the blackberry swamps and cane
thickets of the Southeast United States. The swamp, named for a landowner,
Jacob I’On, was the hunting ground for an early American ornithologist, the
Reverend John Bachman, who in 1833 first found the songbird. His friend
John James Audubon listed the warbler in his “Ornithological Biography.”
As other wetlands were drained and cut, warblers found a refuge in the I’On.
Meanley counted himself fortunate to have twice seen a Bachman’s warbler
in his lifetime—in 1958 and 1963. In his day, he knew that the species was
near extinction. It has not been seen since 1988 and is now presumed to have
joined the passenger pigeon and the ivorybill.

For Meanley, the prince of Southern swamps was the Okefenokee, which
contained up to twenty-five feet of peat deposits, and was once a haunt of
the ivorybill. In describing the swamp’s charms, he wrote that it had
everything: “The live oak hammocks, alligators and large wading birds, and
the legends. In my judgement it is the most picturesque swamp in North
America.” It was, he observed, a mosaic of lakes, shrub bogs, and cypress
heads and bays, and though much of its cypress had been cut in the early
twentieth century, fifty years later, when he was back in the Okefenokee,
lusty regrowth allowed him to say that the swamp “looks today as it did
when it was the stronghold of the Seminoles and Creeks.”

When I was in my twenties, my then husband and I sometimes vacationed in

the Georgia islands—St. Simons or Sea Island—and we went once to the
Okefenokee for a motorboat outing. For hours, we prowled the dark water at
low speed, bathed in the damp, heady Southern air that always made me
happy when I stepped off the plane into its distinctive perfume. I could not
count all the wading birds that stalked in the shallows like tall, aloof models.
We glided past cypress and their peculiar pointy knees. Our guide said the
knees breathed for the cypress. He pulled up to a small island and waved his
hand with a grandiose gesture at the mossy ground. I stepped out of the boat
and felt the ground move in an undulating roll. It was a mat of sphagnum
moss, and although some people say it is like walking on a waterbed, its
billowy heave seemed to me more like a wave of dizziness before you pass
out—a very slow falling sensation although you remain upright.

My most intimate swamp experience came one summer when I lived in a

remote and ramshackle house in Vermont with a beaver-populated swamp
half a mile down in the bottomland. I went to the swamp almost every day
by a circuitous route through the woods, passing a patch of pitcher plants
and two or three sundews, across a brook, following the beavers’ tree-drag
ruts to an old stick dam. There were trout in this swamp and beautiful
painted turtles. I watched the amazing acrobatics of dragonflies with
disbelief that they were actually doing what I saw them do. Even when I sat
on the back porch high above the swamp I thought I could catch the green
smell of bruised lily pads.

Once, after weeks away, I came back to the house in the late afternoon. I had
started reading Norman Maclean’s story “A River Runs Through It” on the
plane ride home and decided to read to the end before I went inside the
house. It was an utterly quiet, windless day, the light softening to peach
nectar. I read the last page and its famous final line, “I am haunted by
waters.” I closed the book and looked toward the swamp. Sitting on a stone
wall fifteen feet away was a large bobcat who had been watching me read.
When our eyes met, the cat slipped into the tall grass like a ribbon of water,
and I watched the grass quiver as it headed down to the woods, to the
stream, to the swamp.
After the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-06 and the Erie Canal’s
gradual opening from 1825 onward, the country’s swelling population
pushed into the new Western territories. The Great Black Swamp, a product
of the excess of mire left over from the glacial melting of the Ice Age-era
Lake Erie, and which covered much of Ohio and parts of Michigan and
Indiana, inspired visceral revulsion. The Black Swamp froze itself blue in
winter and simmered under the summer sun. It was forty miles wide and a
hundred and twenty miles long, an elm-ash watery woodland well stocked
with snakes, wildcats, moose, birds, malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and
unnamed demons, immovably in the way of all who were trying to go west.
Travellers forced to splash through swamps under attack from blackflies, no-
see-ums, and deerflies, or to make long, tiresome detours around watery
areas, complained vociferously and called to the heavens for drainage.

By the eighteen-fifties, farmers noticed that raised stream banks in parts of

the swamp were made of dry black soil. They picked up handfuls of it,
rubbed it between their fingers, felt the friability and tensile strength, judged
its tilth. Then they cut down the stream-bank trees, plowed and planted, and
harvested tremendous crops. They said what every farmer in newly opened
peatland has ever said as they gathered the first harvests: “This is some of
the most productive soil on earth.” Other farmers noticed, and since stream-
bank acres were limited, a few men with experience in wet soils tried
drainage with ditches and tiles. Excited by their success, the farmers
attacked the Black Swamp; a mad make-your-own-land rush was on. In the
eighteen-eighties, an Ohio man, James B. Hill, frustrated by the slow work
of laying drainage tiles, invented a machine he called the Buckeye Traction
Digger. Every farmer wanted one, and the Black Swamp began to dry out.

Pro-drainage legislation helped the process along, and woe betide the
landowner who resisted his neighbor’s drain work. In 1915, Ben Palmer of
Minnesota wrote a legal guide to drainage. Chapter 4—“Drainage
Legislation and Adjudication”—explains, “Thirty-six states of the Union
have now enacted general drainage laws for the purpose of providing the
legal machinery which is necessary if drainage work involving any
considerable amount of land is to be successfully carried on.”

By the early twentieth century, only a pinch of the original Black Swamp
still existed—the rest was “some of the most productive soil on earth.” It
was taken as a stroke of luck that drainage tiles could be made from the clay
deposits beneath the good peaty soil—in a way, the Black Swamp paid for
its own annihilation. But a few generations later the productive soils were
depleted; the nutrients in organic soils will disappear when they are not
replenished. Manure grew scarce as tractors replaced horses. The farm world
welcomed synthetic fertilizer. Time passed, and the Maumee River, which
drains the Ohio cropland watershed, became a major source of pollution in
Lake Erie. I was once on a train that stopped for hours on a bridge over the
Maumee River to let freight traffic through. There was no sign—frothy
scum, iridescent gloss, or bright algae—to show that just below the train
flowed Lake Erie’s poison enemy.

Aside from the joys of draining, there was another pot of gold at the end of
the swamp: fortunes for the nineteenth-century woodland owners and
professional timbermen who cut down the wetland forests not only of Ohio
but of Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, and any other
state north or south that had swamp forests—taking irreplaceable giant elm,
ash, oak, birch, poplar, maple, basswood, hickory, and chestnut.

Ohio residents, by and large, did not appear to miss their state’s swampland.
Sharon Levy, a science writer who specializes in water and wetland issues
today, wrote of the mark the Black Swamp made on Ohioans:

The tough people who conquered the Great Black Swamp did so at
great personal expense, and they’ve passed down a deep and abiding
loathing of wetlands. They are considered a menace, a threat, a thing to
be overcome. These attitudes are enshrined in state law, which makes
impossible any action, including wetland restoration, that slows the
flow of runoff through those miles of constructed drainage ditches—the
very conduits that, after each heavy rainfall, deliver thousands of metric
tons of phosphorus and nitrogen to the Maumee, and onward into Lake
Erie from which millions of people drink.

One authority on water, William Mitsch, has suggested that if ten per cent of
the old Black Swamp soils were allowed to become wetlands again they
would cleanse the runoff, yet Ohioans remain powerfully anti-wetland. Even
private efforts to restore small wetland areas are met with neighbors’
complaints about noisy frogs and fears of flooding. Still, despite all odds,
there exists the Black Swamp Conservancy, a land trust that oversees
twenty-one thousand acres of wetlands. Hundreds of active Black Swamp
Conservancy members are doing their best to restore and protect remnants of
this great swamp. Can they persevere?

My mother’s favorite book when she was a teen-ager, in the nineteen-

twenties, was one that she loved for its swamp setting, Gene Stratton
Porter’s “A Girl of the Limberlost.” The Limberlost Swamp is in northeast
Indiana, forty miles west of the Great Black Swamp. Porter’s home was near
the Limberlost, which, though small at thirteen thousand acres, was still a
diverse and complex system of streams and ponds eventually draining into
the Wabash River. The Limberlost was made up of timber, reeds, sphagnum
moss, orchids, sundew, pitcher plants, and grasses that nurtured great crowds
of waterbirds and migratory birds, snakes, frogs and other amphibians, deer,
muskrat and beaver, mink, and an encyclopedia of insects, including rare
moths and butterflies.

There are at least two and probably more stories of how the name
Limberlost originated. In one, a man named James Miller, so physically
agile he was called Limber Jim, was hunting in the swamp. He became
hopelessly lost, walking in deadly circles before he began to blaze trees in a
straight line. His friends found him and referred to the swamp ever after as
the place where Limber was lost. Another story refers to Limber Jim Corbus
(what is it with these flexible Indiana men?), who also set out for a day’s
hunt in the swamp and became lost, but blazed no trees and was never
found.
“I’ve got all the first-name key chains they don’t put on the rack.”
Cartoon by Suerynn Lee

Despite being considered a “nature” novel, “Girl of the Limberlost” is the

usual American story of taking from nature for personal gain. The book
champions its heroine, Elnora, who collects the chrysalides of moths, then
raises, kills, and mounts them. After her miserable first day in high school,
where she is scorned as an out-of-fashion backwoods hick, she sees a
placard in the local bank window offering cash for moths, cocoons, and pupa
cases. Elnora needs money to buy the kind of nice clothes and cosmetics that
will let her join modish high-school cliques and pay for her books. She
describes her moths to the placard’s writer, who tells her, “Young woman,
that’s the rarest moth in America. If you have a hundred of them they are
worth a hundred dollars according to my list.” Elnora is on her way to
wealth, a career, a rich husband, and all the rest of it, thanks to the corpses of
the Yellow Emperor moth.

Against Porter’s protests, the Limberlost was ruinously drained for farmland
by steam-powered dredges between 1888 and 1910. But in the nineteen-
nineties Indiana readers who treasured Porter’s book bought some of the
original swamp acreage and, with help from several conservation groups,
started restoring the swamp by removing drainage tiles. As the water
deepened, they planted native sedges, grasses, trees, and water plants. Today,
a small piece of the Limberlost exists again, serving as a tourist attraction
and a home to muskrats, ducks, herons, turtles, fish, and insects. The Yellow
Emperor moths are still around.

It is an important decision to restore even a small piece of wetland that has

been severely mauled—once land is apportioned to owners, there can be no
easy path to restoration of a natural habitat. Bogs and swamps take
thousands of years to build up and develop; humans and their machinery can
wipe out those centuries in a few months. But once a few interested people
put on their boots and go into the damaged wetland, and once their curiosity
is aroused about how the water moves, and what plants, amphibians, and
birds formerly thrived in their local remnant swamp, they are hard to stop.
There is unequalled joy in restoration.

Mangroves are marine trees. They grow in brackish and saline water along
Southern and tropical shores—their splayed-out roots resemble the “cages”
that supported Victorian hoop skirts—and they form peat. Their specialized
home ground, such as Florida’s Everglades, is smelly and muddy. There are
roughly sixty species of mangrove, mostly found in Asia, and the strongest
forests are those of mixed species. Mangrove swamps have been called the
earth’s most important ecosystem, because they form a bristling wall that
stabilizes the land’s edge and protects shorelines from hurricanes and
erosion, and because they are breeding grounds and protective nurseries for
thousands of species, including barracuda, tarpon, snook, crabs, shrimp, and
shellfish. They take the full brunt of most storms and hurricanes, and
generally survive—but not always. Hurricane Irma, in 2017, hit the
mangroves of Big Pine Key, in Florida. While shrubs came back after a time,
the mangroves did not. Some saw the cause of mangrove death as trapped
standing salt water, but others thought that the storm surge had plastered a
very fine coating of sediment on the vital aerial roots, which dried into a
choking hard sealant.

Mangrove leaves fall into the water and, as they decay, become the base for
a complex food web benefitting algae, invertebrates, and the creatures who
feed on them, such as jellyfish, anemones, various worms and sponges, and
birds. The peat that mangroves form is especially soft and deep, ideal for
clams and snails, crabs and shrimp. The mangrove’s roots filter out harmful
nitrate and phosphate pollutants. The tangled branches above the water make
a safe habitat for literally thousands of species of insects that attract birds.
They offer resting places for migrating birds and nesting places for others,
including kingfishers, herons, and egrets. Monitor lizards, macaque
monkeys, and fishing cats on the hunt prowl the branches. Below the water,
the knots of interlaced roots protect tiny fish from the ravenous jaws of
larger fish, and even manatees and dolphins take refuge in these swamps.
Mangroves interact with coral by trapping muddy sediment that would
smother the reef, while the offshore reef protects the mangroves and
seagrass beds from pummelling waves. Structurally, mangroves form an
enormous hedge that extends down into the water and high above it. They
are a major part of the “blue carbon” group that absorbs CO2, which also
includes the salt marshes, seagrasses, and beds of kelp and other seaweeds.

With all these virtues, it would seem that mangroves must be the most
valued trees on earth. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Although climate
researchers see mangrove swamps as crucially important frontline defenses
against rising seawater and as superior absorbers of CO2—they are five
times more efficient than tropical forests—they are in big trouble, and
mangrove removal is a constant threat.

In 2010, a count showed that about fifty-three thousand square miles of

mangrove forest protected the earth’s coasts. But six years later thirteen
hundred square miles of mangroves had been lost to palm-oil and rice farms
and shrimp aquaculture. In some cases, mangrove forests have been
removed to make room for shrimp ponds; in other cases, the shrimp ponds
are set back from the mangroves, but the released effluents and pollution still
damage and degrade the mangrove forest by changing the water’s salinity,
altering the mangrove’s ability to take in nutrients. The consequence is slow
death for the mangroves.

Many countries have tried to master the complexities of mangrove

restoration, with mixed results. Choice of the right site and a mutually
beneficial mix of species is critical. Some well-intentioned restorers planted
greenhouse-raised single-species saplings in mudflats that mangroves had
never grown in, or that were exposed to erosion and strong waves. Yet
mudflats have a low oxygen supply because they are constantly wet, and
mangroves need to breathe.
A different approach was that of the Florida biologist, ichthyologist, and
wetlands ecologist Roy (Robin) Lewis III, who worked out the details of
effective mangrove restoration. Repetitive observation can unravel the
mysteries of events and processes. Lewis, who was born in 1944, was still a
graduate student when he began working in mangrove swamps. “I spent a
decade working in the mangroves before I started to have an understanding
of what was going on,” he once remarked. He dedicated years to puzzling
out the rhythms of mangrove happiness. He observed that, in the natural
order, when a mangrove tree died, plentiful seeds from nearby healthy
mangroves floated in and rooted themselves. The problem with many
restoration attempts was location. Just any random part of a shoreline would
not work. The flow of water had to be correct. Mangrove roots need to be
sometimes wet and sometimes dry. Lewis worked out a wet-dry ratio of
thirty to seventy. “They have a short period of wetness, and then they have a
long extended period of dryness, and those alternate daily,” he told a reporter
for the Smithsonian Institute. “That’s the secret: you’ve got to replicate that
hydrology.”

His first trial of this theory came in 1986, with thirteen hundred acres of
damaged and dead mangroves half smothered in dirt and weeds on a flat site
near Fort Lauderdale. After several years of experiment and study, Lewis
brought in earth-moving equipment to create a gentle slope of land that
would allow the natural tidewaters to ebb and flow. Then he waited. The
tides brought mangrove seeds that took root, and five years later three local
species of mangroves were growing. Fish moved into the sheltering roots,
and the birds followed. No mangrove saplings were hand-planted; all the
new trees grew from waterborne mangrove seeds. Lewis’s way of working
with nature—observation and study, planning and patient waiting—has
become the gold standard for restoration.

It is usual to think of the vast wetland losses as a tragedy, with hopeless

conviction that the past cannot be retrieved. Tragic, indeed, and part of our
climate-change anguish. But as we learn how valuable wetlands are in
softening the shocks of the changing climate, and how eagerly the natural
world responds to concerned care, perhaps we can shift the weight of
wetland destruction from inevitable to “not on my watch.” Can we become
Thoreauvian enough to see wetlands as desirable landscapes that protect the
earth while refreshing our joy in existence? For conservationists the world
over, finding this joy is central to having a life well lived.

It is of course possible to love a swamp. I remember another small and

nameless Vermont larch swamp, which could be reached only by passage
through a dark and gloomy ravine that I thought of as the Slough of
Despond.

At the bottom of the ravine ran Jacobs Chopping Brook. The flurried,
emotional water of the brook contrasted with the black glass disk of swamp
water that seemed made to reflect passing clouds but under rain showed
itself as dimpled pewter. It has been fifty years since I last saw it, but it is
still with me. ♦
App推荐-英阅阅读器

安利一个英语专用阅读器
1. 可阅读海量英文原著、英文杂志(经济学人、纽约客等), 支持自定
义OPDS书库;
2. 单击可查询单词释义、句子翻译, 高效、便捷;
3. 支持四、六级、考研、专四、专八等词汇透析;
4. 支持新牛津、柯林斯等英汉-英英MDict字典;
5. 支持划线、高亮笔记、笔记导出;
6. iOS、Android客户端全支持。

点击进入英阅阅读器官网
Art

An Exploration of Chinese Identity, at Asia Society

In 1998, the Asia Society introduced Americans to a new art scene emerging
from China in the seminal show “Inside/Out.” Through Aug. 14, the
museum presents a sequel of sorts: “Mirror Image: A Transformation of
Chinese Identity.” Its curator, Barbara Pollack, presents works by seven
artists, all born after 1976, for whom the binary of East versus West is
essentially moot. Pixy Liao—whose gender-norm-defying photograph
“Shoulder,” from 2021, is seen here—grew up in Shanghai and is now based
in Brooklyn.
Books

Briefly Noted
Modern Art and the Esteem Machine
Fire Island, by Jack Parlett (Hanover Square). This richly textured history
of a place “equal parts real and imagined,” which has served as a queer
summertime mecca for more than a century, unfolds like a pageant,
populated by notable figures who have sought sun, sex, and solace on its
beaches. Against a backdrop of tea dances, costume parties, and anonymous
sexual encounters, we meet W. H. Auden, smoking at daybreak; Patricia
Highsmith, brawling in Duffy’s Bar; Frank O’Hara, killed by a dune buggy.
Parlett captures the giddy excesses, but his real aim is to show how a
community sought to define, protect, liberate, and celebrate themselves,
realizing “the fantasy of a world away from shame and silence.”
The Hangman and His Wife, by Nancy Dougherty (Knopf). Assassinated in
1942 by Czechoslovak resistance fighters, the Nazi official Reinhard
Heydrich left few traces of his life, but Dougherty, who died in 2013, spent
decades researching this account of his rise, most notably through interviews
with Heydrich’s widow, Lina. The son of an opera singer, Heydrich was
dismissed from the Navy before becoming Heinrich Himmler’s deputy and
then the head of the Gestapo. Dubbed “the man with the iron heart” by
Hitler, he comes across as an opportunist rather than as a true believer. Lina,
willfully refusing to accept her husband’s role in atrocities, claims that his
importance is “always overrated.” In photographs, she says, “he’s shown
where he really belongs, always in the second rank.”
Keats, by Lucasta Miller (Knopf). Approaching the arch-Romantic poet
through “Nine Poems and One Epitaph,” this brief biography blends close
readings of Keats’s output with anecdotes gleaned from his letters and the
accounts of contemporaries. Miller draws parallels between art and life
—“To Autumn” is linked to political unrest, “The Eve of St. Agnes” to a
woman with whom Keats had a relationship—without insisting on perfect
correspondences. There are some personal asides, but the focus is on Keats’s
complex life and style, and the book’s deftness and passion make it an
excellent introduction to a poet who remains influential for his ambiguities
and for language that “resists any final definition.”
Imaginary Languages, by Marina Yaguello, translated from the French by
Erik Butler (M.I.T.). Expanding on a study published in France in 1984, a
noted linguist surveys the history of language invention, an enterprise
undertaken by centuries of “lunatic lovers of language,” for reasons
philosophical, political, artistic, and arcane. Yaguello recounts the utopian
impulses behind projects like Esperanto and Volapük; speculative fiction’s
explorations of linguistic theory; and the search, rooted in Judeo-Christian
mythology, for an original, universal tongue. The mind-bending nature of
the book’s subject, which offers seemingly infinite paths of inquiry, could
overwhelm, but Yaguello relates the material with gusto, offering an
idiosyncratic, illuminating perspective on the development of Western
thought.
By Louis Menand

Content

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

Hugh Eakin’s new book, “Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to
America” (Crown), isn’t really about Picasso, or about war, or about art. Its
subject is the creation of a market for a certain product, modern art.

One (mostly) good thing about the digital revolution, which is otherwise
sucking us all into a plutocratic dystopia, is that the Internet has reduced the
barriers to cultural production enormously. Many types of cultural goods are
now much easier to make and much cheaper to distribute. You don’t need an
investor to capitalize your production costs or a distributor to get your stuff
before the public. You just need a laptop and a camera (and maybe an
inspiration). And, no matter how small you are, you always open worldwide.

It’s true that when your product goes online it will be competing with a
zillion similar products—and products that do have investors and
distributors, such as streaming services, are much more likely to attract
audiences and become profitable. But the Internet makes your work
accessible to anyone who wants to see it or read it or listen to it or buy a
copy of it, because barriers to cultural consumption are also much lower.
Goods are far easier to access and to acquire.

Back when all of life was offline, back when to buy a record you had to go
to a record store, back when there were record stores, the infrastructure
required for cultural goods to get from creation to consumption had many
more moving parts. These parts are the principals of Eakin’s story. His focus
isn’t on the big-name modern artists, like Picasso and Matisse, who are
offstage for much of the book. It’s on figures most people have never heard
of: dealers, gallery owners, collectors, curators, and critics—the components
of what sociologists call the art world.

The art world isn’t a fixed entity. It’s continually being reconstituted as new
artistic styles emerge. Twentieth-century fine art, in Europe and the United
States, passed through a series of formally innovative stages, from Cubism
and Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, and each time art
entered a new stage and acquired a new look the art world had to adjust.

At the most basic level, the art world exists to answer the question Is it art?
When Cubist paintings were first produced, around 1907, they did not look
like art to many people, even people who were interested in and appreciated
fine-art painting. The same thing was true of Jackson Pollock’s drip
paintings (around 1950) and Andy Warhol’s soup cans (1962).

But you don’t know it’s art by looking at it. You know it’s art because
galleries want to show it, dealers want to sell it, collectors want to buy it,
museums want to exhibit it, and critics can explain it. When the parts are in
synch, you have a market. The artist produces, and the various audiences—
from billionaire collectors to casual museumgoers and college students
buying van Gogh posters—consume. The art world is what gets the image
from the studio to the dorm room.

The general American public, in the period when modern art emerged,
around the time of the First World War, had no interest in it. Wealthy
Americans, the sort of people who could afford to buy art for their homes,
had no taste for it. Even the art establishment was hostile. In 1913, a Matisse
show at the Art Institute of Chicago instigated a near-riot. Copies of three
Matisse paintings were burned and there was a mock trial, in which Matisse
was convicted of, among other things, artistic murder. The demonstrators
were art students.

In Eakin’s account, the creation of a Picasso market in the United States

—“Picasso” standing for modern art generally—took almost thirty years,
from the first American Picasso show, at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery 291, in
1911 (eighty-three works, one sale), to “Picasso: Forty Years of His Art” at
New York’s Museum of Modern Art, in 1939 (more than three hundred and
sixty works). The MoMA show, as Eakin puts it, “electrified the city.”

High-end department stores like Bonwit Teller and Bergdorf Goodman

began selling Picasso-themed clothing. A national tour followed, and from
then on, Eakin concludes, “the story of modern art—the collectors who
acquired it, the scholars who studied it, the museums that showed it, and the
ordinary people who waited in long lines to see it—would be written in
America.”

Modern art had many middlemen and women in the United States—
Albert C. Barnes, Walter and Louise Arensberg, Katherine S. Dreier, Galka
Scheyer, Solomon R. Guggenheim, Hilla von Rebay, Hans Hofmann, Meyer
Schapiro, Clement Greenberg. Eakin has chosen to center his story on just
two of these people: John Quinn, a collector and an all-around cultural
impresario, who died, of liver cancer, in 1924; and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the
first director of MoMA, which opened in 1929. Using these figures gives his
book a certain symmetry: Quinn tried and failed to do what Barr finally
succeeded in doing, which was to get Americans to accept and appreciate
modern art.

Quinn was a successful Wall Street lawyer who spent much of his money in
support of contemporary art and literature. He was not only an art collector.
He was the principal American adviser and promoter of modern writers like
William Butler Yeats, Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. He
bought their manuscripts as a way of supporting them, and he helped make
their work known in the United States. He negotiated Eliot’s American book
contracts at a time when Eliot was barely a coterie writer. He brought Yeats
to the United States for a national tour. He arranged for the first American
production of J. M. Synge’s “Playboy of the Western World.” He acted as a
talent scout for the publisher Alfred A. Knopf.

Culture industries need to adapt continually to changes in the legal,

financial, and political environment—tax laws, depreciation rules,
government regulations, quotas and tariffs, the availability of capital, and
geopolitical developments, like wars. In what was possibly his most
significant achievement as a supporter of modern art, Quinn single-handedly
got Congress to rewrite a 1909 tax law that imposed a tariff on imported art
less than fifty years old while exempting “historic art.”

Eliminating the modern-art tariff made it much more feasible for American
galleries to exhibit and sell contemporary European painting. Most of the
works in Stieglitz’s Picasso show at 291, for example, were drawings,
because they were assessed at a lower value than paintings. It was too
expensive to bring paintings over from Europe.
Quinn wasn’t just collecting for himself. He was on a mission. As Eakin
puts it, he wanted “to bring American civilization to the forefront of the
modern world.” He thus operated as, in effect, a one-man art world. He
subsidized New York art galleries, often buying many of the works they
showed. He was a key figure behind the 1913 Armory Show, where the
public could see more than thirteen hundred works of modern art, and where
Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” became a succès de
scandale.

When modern art was attacked for undermining American values—the

Times called the Armory Show “part of the general movement, discernible
all over the world, to disrupt and degrade, if not to destroy, not only art, but
literature and society, too”—Quinn worked the press, giving interviews to
New York papers in which he labelled unsigned attacks like that one “Ku
Klux criticism.” Over time, he built up a huge collection of modern
European painting and sculpture, which he stored in his ninth-floor
apartment on Central Park West.

The apartment was a rental. Quinn was rich, but he wasn’t J. P. Morgan rich.
Morgan spent something like sixty million dollars on art, most of which he
donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of which he was the chairman.
Quinn didn’t have that kind of money. On the other hand, Morgan was
buying Old Masters (he was the force behind the 1909 tax law exempting
“historic art” which Quinn got rewritten), while Quinn was buying work that
almost no one else wanted. From the point of view of the American art
world, the incredible collection he amassed, containing works by, among
others, Brâncuși, Braque, Duchamp, Gris, Matisse, Picasso, Rousseau,
Seurat, van Gogh, and Villon, was close to worthless when he died. No
American dealer could sell it, and no American museum wanted to hang it.

Knowing this, Quinn directed, in his will, that his collection be sold at
auction, with the proceeds to go to his sister and his niece, who were his
only heirs. (Quinn never married, but he had relationships with a number of
notable women; at the time of his death, his partner was Jeanne Robert
Foster, the daughter of a lumberjack, an astonishingly beautiful and gifted
woman who was closely involved in his search for new art.) Since
Americans didn’t want it, much of Quinn’s collection of European art thus
ended up going back to Europe.
Conveniently for Eakin’s narrative arc, Alfred Barr, then a young art-history
professor at Wellesley, was able to see some of Quinn’s collection before it
was dispersed, which allows Eakin to propose that one of Barr’s aspirations
when he accepted the directorship of MoMA three years later was to
reassemble the Quinn collection and bring it back to America. This was
impossible, of course. The pieces were now in too many hands. But MoMA
became, in effect, Quinn’s museum, and Quinn’s canon (plus photography
and a few artists, like Klee and Kandinsky, whose work Quinn did not
collect) became Barr’s canon.

And it is still MoMA’s canon. If you walk through the fifth floor of MoMA
today, where art that is owned by the museum and that was made between
1880 and 1940 is displayed, you will be looking at the very works whose
art-world adventures are the subject of Eakin’s book.

Probably hundreds of people pass by those works every day, and none of
them seem scandalized, even by Picasso’s eight-foot-high “Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon,” painted in 1907—five naked women in a brothel, cubistically
rendered, two with faces like African masks, aggressively confronting the
viewer. (You need to stand very close to the canvas to get the proper effect,
though almost no one does.) The shock of the new has worn off. This was
probably not the kind of public acceptance that Quinn and Barr had in mind.
But, as Gertrude Stein once said, “You can be a museum or you can be
modern, but you cannot be both.”

There is a Paris side to Eakin’s story, too. Again, the focus is mainly on two
figures: the gallerists Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Paul Rosenberg. (A
third operator, a kind of freelance dealer and ladies’ man named Henri-Pierre
Roché, who referred to his penis as “mon God,” and who scouted deals for
Quinn, has a colorful part in the story.)
Cartoon by Will McPhail

Of the circumstances that culture industries are obliged to adapt to, none
played a more powerful role in the first half of the twentieth century than
geopolitics. Kahnweiler did not sell his artists’ work in France, even though
his gallery was in Paris. His collectors were in Germany and Russia,
countries where modern art was created and understood. But the First World
War and the Russian Revolution shut those markets down. As a German
national, Kahnweiler even suffered the seizure of his collection by the
French government.

A decade later, the rise to power of Stalin and then Hitler made conditions
much worse. The governments of both leaders made modern art a political
target. (The Nazis referred to modern art as Kunstbolschewismus—
Bolshevik art—even though it was equally anathema in the Soviet Union.)
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union did not just censor modern artists and
writers. They imprisoned them and they killed them. After 1933, the year
Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany, the United States suddenly became
attractive as a place where modern art could safely be shown. Hitler and
Stalin provided the tailwind for Quinn and Barr’s mission to modernize
American taste.

Kahnweiler and Rosenberg are keys to Eakin’s story because both men
represented Picasso, and Eakin thinks that Quinn and Barr were determined
to make Picasso the face of modern art in America. He says that Barr
regarded “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” in particular, as a painting that
could define MoMA’s entire collection.

But Barr had a hard time persuading his board of trustees to actually buy art,
as opposed to borrowing it for exhibitions. The museum mounted highly
successful retrospectives of Matisse in 1931 (thirty-six thousand visitors)
and van Gogh in 1935 (a blockbuster, and really the exhibition that
established a public for modern art in the United States), but the trustees
declined to purchase a single work by Matisse, and they passed on van
Gogh’s “Starry Night,” an image that would one day grace countless coffee
mugs.

MoMA’s efforts to acquire “Les Demoiselles” is a good example of the

twists and turns in the road from artist to public. When Picasso finished the
painting, he let some people see it in his studio in Paris, where it acquired
what Eakin calls a “cultlike status.” But the work was rarely exhibited
publicly. Picasso liked to hold on to his best pieces, and he kept “Les
Demoiselles” rolled up for years. In 1924, he sold it to Jacques Doucet, a
fashion designer. (Doucet’s wife refused to allow him to hang it in their
living room. The new was still a shock to her.) Doucet paid twenty-four
thousand francs—about twelve hundred dollars at the time.

Barr knew where the painting had gone, and in 1935 he tried to persuade
Doucet’s wife, who was now a widow, to lend it to MoMA for a show on
Cubism. She refused. But a year later she sold the work to a Paris dealer,
Germain Seligmann, for a hundred and fifty thousand francs—about six
thousand dollars. Imagining that he could get a good price for it in New
York, Seligmann had the painting shipped to his gallery there, and that was
how Barr found out that it was back on the market.

When he approached the MoMA board, however, the members balked at

Seligmann’s asking price of thirty thousand dollars. Barr exerted what
pressure he could, including having art-world allies testify to the work’s
historical significance, but to no avail. In the end, he found a provision in a
bequest to MoMA that permitted the sale of one of the works in the donor’s
collection in order to purchase another. He picked a Degas horse-racing
scene and offered it to Seligmann in exchange for “Les Demoiselles,” a
transaction that did not require board approval.

Seligmann and Barr agreed that the Degas was worth eighteen thousand
dollars. Seligmann had reduced his ask on the Picasso to twenty-eight
thousand, and he now said that he would “donate” the remaining ten
thousand—an act of generosity that was the financial equivalent of an air
kiss, since no cash changed hands. As Eakin points out, the deal still left
Seligmann with a three-hundred-per-cent profit.

And so, for the cost of a run-of-the-mill Degas, and almost thirty years after
it was painted, Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” a work as
apotheosized in the history of modern painting as “The Waste Land” is in the
history of modern poetry, was finally available for public viewing. In 1941,
the museum did acquire “The Starry Night,” also through an exchange.
Today, the paintings hang within a few yards of each other on the fifth floor.

The story in “Picasso’s War” is well told, with an impressive level of

biographical detail. As a picture of interwar transatlantic cultural exchange,
it necessarily (because of the Quinn-Barr hook) leaves out a lot, notably
Bauhaus and Dada, both of which had an impact on American art-making
and American taste. But, as an account of the means by which Picasso and
the styles of painting with which he was associated achieved cultural
prestige in the United States, it’s an admirable and enjoyable book.

Does it matter that Eakin doesn’t have much to say about the art that his
protagonists are scheming to promote? A little. Artists and writers do not
operate in some otherworldly zone. They want recognition. They want sales.
Like everyone else in the art world, they are responsive to the social,
political, and financial environment, and this affects their artistic choices.
Still, what mattered most to the artists Eakin is writing about was the work
of their peers and the art of the past which they emulated or reacted against,
and that is a subject on which many books have been written.

Eakin also leaves unanswered (and unasked) an obvious question: Why did
Americans’ tastes change between 1911 and 1939? It couldn’t just be
because Alfred Barr found the means to acquire Picassos for his museum.
What turned modern art from a matter for connoisseurs and academics into,
to put it crudely, a middlebrow phenomenon?

The transition must have involved significant social changes. For modern
literature, the work of writers like Eliot, Stein, and Joyce took a
chronologically parallel route to acceptance and, ultimately, canonization.
You could not even legally bring a copy of Joyce’s “Ulysses” into the United
States until 1934, twelve years after it had been published in Paris. But at
some point Americans who aspired to cultural literacy started to feel that it
was important to read “Ulysses” and “The Waste Land,” and to know how to
look at a Picasso and a Kandinsky. These were works that an educated and
worldly person needed to have some familiarity with. What made people
think this?

Quinn and Barr never met, and that was probably for the best, since they
were very different personalities. Barr was a brilliant museum director who
had an essentially academic approach to modern art. Quinn was a
businessman. His edges were much rougher. His letters to the writers and
artists whose work he advocated for reflect his complete (and completely
pro-bono) absorption in their legal and financial affairs. And he seems to
have been genuinely appreciative of their work.

But he was also a ranter and a bigot. Obliged to acknowledge this, Eakin
quotes one letter in which Quinn refers to Rosenberg as “a cheap little Jew,”
and another, to Ezra Pound, in which he complains about the “million Jews,
who are mere walking appetites” in New York City. This may underplay the
bigotry. There was a lot worse to pick from. In 1919, for instance, when
Quinn was trying to get Eliot’s poems published in the United States, he
grew frustrated with the publishers Albert Boni and Horace Liveright, who
were Jewish. “It is a dirty piece of Jew impertinence,” he complained in a
letter to Eliot, “calculated impertinence at that, for that is the way that type
of Jew thinks he can impress his personality. . . . Feeling as I do about this
matter, of course I have the keenest possible feelings regarding Jew pogroms
in Poland. . . . It also occurs to me that I might be willing to even agree to
make a modest contribution and take a modest part in a pogrom here. There
might be a couple of additional pogroms in the outlying districts, one in the
Bronx and one in Brooklyn.” We don’t encounter this Quinn in Eakin’s
book. Nevertheless, three years later, Boni and Liveright published “The
Waste Land,” in a deal negotiated by Quinn. Business first.

Is the art world, as we’ve known it, still intact? Obviously, the market is
functioning. Art gets displayed, reviewed, bought, and sold. For a while, it
seemed that painting and sculpture might be less susceptible than other
cultural goods to the effects of digitization. Unlike a song or a book or a
video, a painting is unique. A Pollock is worth millions; a copy of a Pollock
is worth the cost of the materials required to produce it plus whatever
permission fee was charged for the reproduction by the rightsholders.

It was therefore possible to feel that the monetary value of a painting

correlated with its art-world value. Pollocks were worth a lot of money
because museums displayed them, critics argued about them, art historians
assigned Pollock an important place in the story of modern art, and so on.
The art world could continue to perform its gatekeeping function in much
the way it had in Alfred Barr’s time.

But the Internet does not suffer exemptions. Nothing may go undigitized.
Today, many collectors do not buy physical works of art. They buy art works
(among lots of other stuff) in the form of N.F.T.s, which are purely digital
products. They don’t need the physical work, because they’re not
assembling collections; they’re speculating.

It’s not that people have never bought art on speculation (although,
historically, you’d be better off in a stock-market-index fund). It’s that the
art world has started to come apart. Curation and criticism are increasingly
detached from the rest of the mechanism. The market today is driven by
dealers and collectors, neither group appearing to care whether museums
and reviewers have validated the work they are buying and selling.

Certainly, art critics may feel that they’re becoming irrelevant. In an article
on recent sales at auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s, in which very
new paintings by very new artists attracted seven-figure bids, the Times art
critic Jason Farago concluded that “the time between a new work’s creation,
digital dissemination, purchase and resale has become so compressed that
the old legitimation mechanism simply cannot function.” He worried that
this might be “part of a larger and, in the end, hazardous cultural reversal in
which numerical measurement, measured in dollars or in likes, are the only
records of quality or importance.” Welcome to the desert of the virtual.

And are paintings still unique? Advances in 3-D printing may soon make it
possible to produce a copy of “The Starry Night” that is indistinguishable
from the canvas Vincent van Gogh painted. Your dorm room can look
exactly like the fifth floor of the Museum of Modern Art. You may want to
think about installing a gift shop. ♦
Comment

We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe. We’re

Going Somewhere Worse
By Jia Tolentino

Content

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

In the weeks since a draft of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v.

Jackson Women’s Health Organization—a case about a Mississippi law that
bans abortion after fifteen weeks, with some health-related exceptions but
none for rape or incest—was leaked, a slogan has been revived: “We won’t
go back.” It has been chanted at marches, defiantly but also somewhat
awkwardly, given that this is plainly an era of repression and regression, in
which abortion rights are not the only rights disappearing. Now that the
Supreme Court has issued its final decision, overturning Roe v. Wade and
removing the constitutional right to abortion, insuring that abortion will
become illegal or highly restricted in twenty states, the slogan sounds almost
divorced from reality—an indication, perhaps, of how difficult it has become
to comprehend the power and the right-wing extremism of the current
Supreme Court.

Support for abortion has never been higher, with more than two-thirds of
Americans in favor of retaining Roe, and fifty-seven per cent affirming a
woman’s right to abortion for any reason. Even so, there are Republican
officials who have made it clear that they will attempt to pass a federal ban
on abortion if and when they control both chambers of Congress and the
Presidency. Anyone who can get pregnant must now face the reality that half
of the country is in the hands of legislators who believe that your
personhood and autonomy are conditional—who believe that, if you are
impregnated by another person, under any circumstance, you have a legal
and moral duty to undergo pregnancy, delivery, and, in all likelihood, two
decades or more of caregiving, no matter the permanent and potentially
devastating consequences for your body, your heart, your mind, your family,
your ability to put food on the table, your plans, your aspirations, your life.

Abortion Access After Roe

New Yorker writers answer questions about what comes next for
reproductive rights.
“We won’t go back”—it’s an inadequate rallying cry, prompted only by
events that belie its message. But it is true in at least one sense. The future
that we now inhabit will not resemble the past before Roe, when women
sought out illegal abortions and not infrequently found death. The principal
danger now lies elsewhere, and arguably reaches further. We have entered an
era not of unsafe abortion but of widespread state surveillance and
criminalization—of pregnant women, certainly, but also of doctors and
pharmacists and clinic staffers and volunteers and friends and family
members, of anyone who comes into meaningful contact with a pregnancy
that does not end in a healthy birth. Those who argue that this decision won’t
actually change things much—an instinct you’ll find on both sides of the
political divide—are blind to the ways in which state-level anti-abortion
crusades have already turned pregnancy into punishment, and the ways in
which the situation is poised to become much worse.

In the states where abortion has been or will soon be banned, any pregnancy
loss past an early cutoff can now potentially be investigated as a crime.
Search histories, browsing histories, text messages, location data, payment
data, information from period-tracking apps—prosecutors can examine all of
it if they believe that the loss of a pregnancy may have been deliberate. Even
if prosecutors fail to prove that an abortion took place, those who are
investigated will be punished by the process, liable for whatever might be
found.

Five years ago, Latice Fisher, a Black mother of three from Mississippi, who
made eleven dollars an hour as a police-radio operator, experienced a
stillbirth, at roughly thirty-six weeks, at home. When questioned, she
acknowledged that she didn’t want more kids and couldn’t afford to take
care of more kids. She surrendered her phone to investigators, who scraped
it for search data and found search terms regarding mifepristone and
misoprostol, i.e., abortion pills.

These pills are among the reasons that we are not going back to the era of
coat hangers. They can be prescribed via telemedicine and delivered via
mail; allowing for the prescription of an extra dose, they are ninety-five to
ninety-eight per cent effective in cases of pregnancy up to eleven weeks,
which account for almost ninety per cent of all abortions in the U.S. Already,
more than half of all abortions in the country are medication abortions. In
nineteen states, doctors are prohibited from providing abortions via
telemedicine, but women can seek help from clinicians in other states and
abroad, such as Rebecca Gomperts, who leads Aid Access, an organization
based in Austria that is openly providing abortion pills to women in
prohibition states, and has been safely mailing abortion pills to pregnant
people all over the world since 2005, with the organization Women on Web.
In advance of the U.S. bans, Gomperts has been promoting advance
prescription: sympathetic doctors might prescribe abortion pills for any
menstruating person, removing some of the fears—and, possibly, the
traceability—that would come with attempting to get the pills after
pregnancy. Misoprostol can be prescribed for other issues, such as stomach
ulcers, and Gomperts argues that there is no reasonable medical argument
against advance prescription. “If you buy bleach in the supermarket, that’s
more dangerous,” she has said.

There was no evidence that Latice Fisher took an abortion pill. She
maintained that she had experienced a stillbirth—an occurrence in one out of
every hundred and sixty pregnancies in the U.S. Nonetheless, she was
charged with second-degree murder and held for several weeks on a
hundred-thousand-dollar bond. The district attorney, Scott Colom, had
campaigned as a progressive reformer; advocates pushed him to drop the
murder charge, and to provide a new grand jury with information about an
antiquated, unreliable “float test” that had been used as a basis for the
allegation that Fisher’s baby was born alive. The grand jury declined to
indict Fisher again; the ordeal took more than three years.

Even if it remains possible in prohibition states to order abortion pills, doing

so will be unlawful. (Missouri recently proposed classifying the delivery or
shipment of these pills as drug trafficking. Louisiana just passed a law that
makes mailing abortion pills to a resident of the state a criminal offense,
punishable by six months’ imprisonment.) In many states, to avoid breaking
the law, a woman would have to drive to a state where abortion is legal, have
a telemedicine consultation there, and then receive the pills in that state.
Many women in Texas have opted for a riskier but easier option: to drive
across the border, to Mexico, and get abortion pills from unregulated
pharmacies, where pharmacists may issue incorrect advice for usage. Some
women who lack the freedom and money to travel out of state, and who
might fear the consequences of seeking a clinical confirmation of their
gestational stage, will order abortion pills without a clear understanding of
how far along they are in pregnancy. Abortion pills are safe and effective,
but patients need access to clinical guidance and follow-up care. Women in
prohibition states who want to seek medical attention after a self-managed
abortion will, as a rule, have to choose between risking their freedom and
risking their health.

Both abortion and miscarriage currently occur more than a million times
each year in America, and the two events are often clinically
indistinguishable. Because of this, prohibition states will have a profoundly
invasive interest in differentiating between them. Some have already laid the
groundwork for establishing government databases of pregnant women
likely to seek abortions. Last year, Arkansas passed a law called the Every
Mom Matters Act, which requires women considering abortion to call a state
hotline and requires abortion providers to register all patients in a database
with a unique I.D. Since then, six other states have implemented or proposed
similar laws. The hotlines are provided by crisis pregnancy centers: typically
Christian organizations, many of which masquerade as abortion clinics,
provide no health care, and passionately counsel women against abortion.
Crisis pregnancy centers are already three times as numerous as abortion
clinics in the U.S., and, unlike hospitals, they are not required to protect the
privacy of those who come to them. For years, conservative states have been
redirecting money, often from funds earmarked for poor women and
children, toward these organizations. The data that crisis pregnancy centers
are capable of collecting—names, locations, family details, sexual and
medical histories, non-diagnostic ultrasound images—can now be deployed
against those who seek their help.

If you become pregnant, your phone generally knows before many of your
friends do. The entire Internet economy is built on meticulous user tracking
of purchases and search terms. Laws modelled on Texas’s S.B. 8, which
encourages private citizens to file lawsuits against anyone who facilitates an
abortion, will proliferate, giving self-appointed vigilantes no shortage of
tools to track and identify suspects. (The National Right to Life Committee
recently published policy recommendations for anti-abortion states that
included criminal penalties for anyone who provides information about self-
managed abortion “over the telephone, the internet, or any other medium of
communication.”) A reporter for Vice recently spent a mere hundred and
sixty dollars to purchase a data set on visits to more than six hundred
Planned Parenthood clinics. Brokers sell data that make it possible to track
journeys to and from any location—say, an abortion clinic in another state.
In Missouri, this year, a lawmaker proposed a measure that would allow
private citizens to sue anyone who helps a resident of the state get an
abortion elsewhere; as with S.B. 8, the law would reward successful
plaintiffs with ten thousand dollars. The closest analogue to this kind of
legislation is the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793.

For now, the targets of S.B. 8-type bounty laws are those who provide
abortions, not those who seek them. But that seems likely to change.
Connecticut, a progressive state on the matter of abortion, recently passed a
law that prevents local agencies from coöperating with out-of-state abortion
prosecutions and protects the medical records of out-of-state clients. Other
progressive states will follow suit. If prohibition states can’t sue out-of-state
doctors, and, if abortion pills sent by mail remain largely undetectable, the
only people left to target will be abortion advocates and those trying to get
abortions. The Stream, a conservative Christian publication, recently
advocated mandatory psychiatric custody for women who get abortions. In
May, Louisiana advanced a bill that would allow abortion patients to be
charged with murder. The proposal was withdrawn, but the threat had been
made.

The theological concept of fetal personhood—the idea that, from the

moment of conception, an embryo or fetus is a full human being, deserving
of equal (or, more accurately, superior) rights—is a foundational doctrine of
the anti-abortion movement. The legal ramifications of this idea—including
the possible classification of I.V.F., IUDs, and the morning-after pill as
instruments of murder—are unhinged, and much harsher than what even the
average anti-abortion American is currently willing to embrace.
Nonetheless, the anti-abortion movement is now openly pushing for fetal
personhood to become the foundation of U.S. abortion law.

If a fetus is a person, then a legal framework can be invented to require

someone who has one living inside her to do everything in her power to
protect it, including—as happened to Savita Halappanavar, in Ireland, which
operated under a fetal-personhood doctrine until 2018, and to Izabela Sajbor,
in Poland, where all abortion is effectively illegal—to die. No other such
obligation exists anywhere in our society, which grants cops the freedom to
stand by as children are murdered behind an unlocked door. In Poland,
pregnant women with cancer have been routinely denied chemotherapy
because of clinicians’ fears of harming the fetus.

Fetal-personhood laws have passed in Georgia and Alabama, and they are no
longer likely to be found unconstitutional. Such laws justify a full-scale
criminalization of pregnancy, whereby women can be arrested, detained, and
otherwise placed under state intervention for taking actions perceived to be
potentially harmful to a fetus. This approach has been steadily tested, on
low-income minorities in particular, for the past four decades. National
Advocates for Pregnant Women—the organization that has provided legal
defense for most of the cases mentioned in this article—has documented
almost eighteen hundred cases, from 1973 to 2020, of prosecutions or forced
interventions related to pregnancy; this is likely a substantial undercount.
Even in states such as California, where the law explicitly prohibits charging
women with murder after a pregnancy loss, conservative prosecutors are
doing so anyway.

Most pregnancy-related prosecutions, so far, have revolved around drug use.

Women who used drugs while pregnant, or sought treatment for drug use
during pregnancy, have been charged with child abuse, child neglect,
distribution of drugs to a minor, assault with a deadly weapon, manslaughter,
and homicide. In 2020, law enforcement in Alabama investigated a woman
named Kim Blalock for chemical endangerment of a child after she told
delivery-room staff that she had been taking prescribed hydrocodone for
pain management. (The district attorney charged her with prescription fraud
—a felony—before eventually dropping the prosecution altogether.) There
has been a string of shocking recent prosecutions in Oklahoma, in which
women who used drugs have been charged with manslaughter for
miscarrying well before the point of viability. In Wisconsin, state law
already allows juvenile courts to take a fetus—meaning a pregnant woman
—into custody for the fetus’s protection, resulting in the detention and
forced treatment of more than four hundred pregnant women every year on
the suspicion that they may be consuming controlled substances. A proposed
law in Wyoming would create a specific category of felony child
endangerment for drug use while pregnant, a law that resembles Tennessee’s
former Fetal Assault Law. The Tennessee law was discontinued after two
years, because treating women as adversaries to the fetuses they carry has a
chilling effect on prenatal medicine, and inevitably results in an increase in
maternal and infant death.

The mainstream pro-choice movement has largely ignored the growing

criminalization of pregnancy, just as it has generally ignored the inadequacy
of Roe. (It took Joe Biden, who campaigned on making Roe the “law of the
land,” more than a year to say the word “abortion” on the record after he
became President; the Democrats, given the chance to override the filibuster
and codify Roe in May, predictably failed to do so.) Many of those who
support the right to abortion have tacitly accepted that poor and minority
women in conservative states lost access to abortion long before this
Supreme Court decision, and have quietly hoped that the thousands of
women facing arrest after pregnancy, miscarriage, stillbirth, or even healthy
deliveries were unfortunate outliers. They were not outliers, and, as the
columnist Rebecca Traister noted last month, the chasm between the
impervious class and everyone else is growing every day.

Pregnancy is more than thirty times more dangerous than abortion. One
study estimates that a nationwide ban would lead to a twenty-one-per-cent
rise in pregnancy-related deaths. Some of the women who will die from
abortion bans are pregnant right now. Their deaths will come not from back-
alley procedures but from a silent denial of care: interventions delayed,
desires disregarded. They will die of infections, of preëclampsia, of
hemorrhage, as they are forced to submit their bodies to pregnancies that
they never wanted to carry, and it will not be hard for the anti-abortion
movement to accept these deaths as a tragic, even noble, consequence of
womanhood itself.

In the meantime, abortion bans will hurt, disable, and endanger many people
who want to carry their pregnancies to term but who encounter medical
difficulties. Physicians in prohibition states have already begun declining to
treat women who are in the midst of miscarriages, for fear that the treatment
could be classified as abortion. One woman in Texas was told that she had to
drive fifteen hours to New Mexico to have her ectopic pregnancy—which is
nonviable, by definition, and always dangerous to the mother—removed.
Misoprostol, one of the abortion pills, is routinely prescribed for miscarriage
management, because it causes the uterus to expel any remaining tissue.
Pharmacists in Texas, fearing legal liability, have already refused to
prescribe it. If a miscarriage is not managed to a safe completion, women
risk—among other things, and taking the emotional damage for granted—
uterine perforation, organ failure, infection, infertility, and death.

Most miscarriages are caused by factors beyond a pregnant person’s control:

illnesses, placental or uterine irregularities, genetic abnormalities. But the
treatment of pregnant people in this country already makes many of them
feel directly and solely responsible for the survival of their fetus. They are
told to absolutely avoid alcohol, coffee, retinol, deli turkey, unpasteurized
cheese, hot baths, vigorous exercise, drugs that are not prescribed to them,
drugs that they have been prescribed for years—often without any
explanation of the frequently shoddy reasoning behind these prohibitions.
Structural factors that clearly increase the likelihood of miscarriage—
poverty, environmental-chemical exposure, working night shifts—are less
likely to come up. As fetal personhood becomes law in more of the land,
pregnant people, as Lynn Paltrow, the director of National Advocates for
Pregnant Women, has pointed out, “could be sued, or prevented from
engaging in travel, work, or any activity that is believed to create a risk to
the life of the unborn.”

Half a century ago, the anti-abortion movement was dominated by

progressive, antiwar, pro-welfare Catholics. Today, the movement is
conservative, evangelical, and absolutely single-minded, populated
overwhelmingly by people who, although they may embrace foster care,
adoption, and various forms of private ministry, show no interest in pushing
for public, structural support for human life once it’s left the womb. The
scholar Mary Ziegler recently noted that today’s anti-abortion advocates see
the “strategies of earlier decades as apologetic, cowardly, and
counterproductive.” During the past four years, eleven states have passed
abortion bans that contain no exceptions for rape or incest, a previously
unthinkable extreme.

In Texas, already, children aged nine, ten, and eleven, who don’t yet
understand what sex and abuse are, face forced pregnancy and childbirth
after being raped. Women sitting in emergency rooms in the midst of
miscarriages are being denied treatment for sepsis because their fetuses’
hearts haven’t yet stopped. People you’ll never hear of will spend the rest of
their lives trying and failing, agonizingly, in this punitive country, to provide
stability for a first or fifth child they knew they weren’t equipped to care for.

In the face of all this, there has been so much squeamishness, even in the
pro-choice camp: a tone that casts abortion as an unfortunate necessity; an
approach to messaging which values choice but devalues abortion care itself,
which emphasizes reproductive rights rather than reproductive justice. That
approach has landed us here. We are not going back to the pre-Roe era, and
we should not want to go back to the era that succeeded it, which was less
bitter than the present but was never good enough. We should demand more,
and we will have to. We will need to be full-throated and unconditional
about abortion as a necessary precondition to justice and equal rights if we
want even a chance of someday getting somewhere better. ♦

An earlier version of this article inaccurately described aspects of the legal

process concerning Latice Fisher’s case.
Crossword

The Crossword: Thursday, June 23, 2022

By Robyn Weintraub
Curation Dept.

A Reporter in Right-Wing “Crazy Town”

By Bill Adair

The right-wing media ecosystem is sometimes described as a perpetual

outrage machine (headlines on a recent day included “THE LEFT’S GRAND
PLAN TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY” and “ELON MUSK IS THE BOSS
ALL WOKE LOSERS NEED”), but that doesn’t mean there aren’t occasional
droughts. Last Monday morning, as Howard Polskin began prowling right-
wing Web sites in search of material for TheRighting, the newsletter he
founded to provide a daily roundup of the conservative commentariat, he
looked worried. The previous week, the hearings into the January 6th attack
on the Capitol had elicited a steady stream of headlines that were
provocative enough to serve as the newsletter’s subject line (“THE J6
COMMITTEE’s REAL TARGET IS YOU”). But a weekend break had raised
the possibility of an unlikely lull. Ordinarily, Polskin waits until 10 A.M. to
allow himself a stick of gum, but this morning he was nervously chewing by
nine. “We’ll have another in the afternoon, maybe two, if it’s a bad day,” he
said.

Polskin, who is seventy-one, with bright-green eyes and a bushy mustache,

was sitting at the dining-room table in his beachfront co-op, in Boca Raton.
He worked from a handwritten list of fifty conservative outlets, which he
peruses each day. He chooses articles for many reasons, but a big factor is
having a grabby headline. He sends the top seventeen to his newsletter
subscribers—a few thousand that includes people in academia and the
media, plus a smattering of political staffers. “I’m looking at what’s going to
reveal the heart and soul of the right,” he said. He tries to offer a full
spectrum of conservative politics, in curated form. “So you get crazy shit
like ‘Justin Trudeau: Fidel Castro’s son.’ But then you also get the Wall
Street Journal saying freedom isn’t quite dead.”

Polskin has been in the media industry—reporter at local paper in New

Jersey, P.R. for CNN—for forty-eight years. He created TheRighting after
the 2016 election. “Something happened in this country that led to the
election of Donald Trump,” he said. “I don’t like it, but I think it’s got to be
understood more.” Subscriptions are free. A grant from the Ford Foundation
pays occasional freelancers. He is driven more by curiosity than by profit,
which is zero; for a week last summer, he stood on a street corner tallying
whether people wore masks, simply to satisfy his own interest.

In addition to the newsletter, he tracks Web traffic to conservative sites and

writes trend articles. He thinks that Breitbart and Infowars are losing their
edge; they used to be Polskin’s most consistent source of headlines. “Not so
much anymore,” he said. “It’s just not as interesting.” Lately, he has been
more likely to cite the Daily Caller (“Pronoun Police Attempt Another
Arrest”); WND (“It’s Not A Gun Crisis—It’s A Spiritual Crisis”); or NOQ
Report (“Bill Gates Lays Out Plan for Global Takeover”).

What about the response to the January 6th hearings? Polskin broke the
coverage down into three camps. There’s the predictable fare, deriding the
proceedings as political hackery. “Then there’s stuff that’s far more, you
know, going toward crazy town.” (He cited Tucker Carlson.) But, he added,
“I’m seeing an increase in some anti-Trump stories, and I actually started
creating a file on that.”

Polskin’s liberal friends sometimes worry that he spends too much time
behind enemy lines. “The knee-jerk reaction, to the mainstreamers and
liberals, is that everything coming out from the right is poison,” he said.
“Does it take a toll on a doctor at the C.D.C. studying the coronavirus when
he looks under a microscope? No. I have a clinical detachment to it. It’s like
I’m an explorer in a new land.” Still, he’s concerned about growing numb to
poisonous language, such as the comparison of Anthony Fauci to Josef
Mengele.

He turned back to the headline search. The day’s batch was particularly
weak. Two were so unclear that he had to paraphrase. A Bill O’Reilly
headline about voters’ anger with Joe Biden (“It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad
World”) became “Bill O’Reilly: Biden May Resign for Health Reasons.”

Polskin also chose a few that were more straightforward: “DEMS START TO
PREP AMERICA FOR THEIR MID-TERM STEAL” (“So irresponsible,” he
said); “The Definitive Proof That Critical Race Theory Is Being Taught in
Our Schools” (“Kind of an evergreen”); and “It Seems Black Americans
Miss Trump.”

But he still hadn’t found a headline worthy of the newsletter’s subject line.
After nearly an hour of searching, one caught his eye: “January 6 Was Not A
Coup.” It was from The American Conservative, which Polskin did not
consider to be part of “crazy town.” It was short, punchy, simple. “Any
reasonable person would conclude that there was a coup,” he said. “And
here we have a fairly respectable conservative publication saying it was not
a coup. And I love the line ‘To stage a coup, you need tanks on the White
House lawn.’ ” He looked relieved. “It ticks a lot of boxes,” he said. ♦
Fiction

“To Sunland”
By Lauren Groff

Content

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

Audio: Lauren Groff reads.

He woke to an angry house and darkness in the windows. Aunt Maisie had
packed his suitcase the night before and left it near the front door, and so he
dressed himself without turning on the light and came out and dropped the
pajamas on top of the suitcase. She was in the kitchen, banging the pans
around.

Buddy, she said when she saw him, set yourself down and get some of this
food in you. Her eyes were funny, all red and puffy, and he didn’t like to see
them like that. When he sat down, she came up behind him and hugged his
head so hard it hurt, and her hands smelled like soap and cigarettes and
grease, and he pulled away.

He ate her eggs, which were like his mother’s eggs, though her biscuit was
not like his mother’s biscuit; it was too dry, and there was no tomato jam.
When he was finished, she took his plate and fork and washed them.

Lauren Groff on faith and Flannery O’Connor.

I can’t stand it, she said. I will never forgive that girl, not as long as I live.

All right, he said softly.

I can’t stay around to watch this, she said. You get your shoes and coat on.
I’m going in to work early so’s I don’t have to look that selfish, wicked girl
in the face. She gathered her own things and swiped a thin red line of
lipstick on her mouth, then took her car keys from the hook and went out the
front door. There she bent to put his pajamas in his suitcase, and said
impatiently, You come on outside, Buddy. That rocking chair’s comfortable
enough for you to wait in, I wager. I’ll get you a jelly jar of water. You need
to relieve yourself, get down off the porch and do it in the azaleas.
Now he was outside in the darkness, and the smell of the orange blossoms
was all around. The light above Aunt Maisie’s front door was thick with
termites that were flying in and out of the beam.

Aunt Maisie came out again with water for Buddy and locked her front door,
and, for a second, as she leaned toward the lock, in the dim light her hair
was the same as his mother’s hair, and he forgot, and thought she was his
mother, and he nearly cried out in gladness. Then she looked up at him and it
was with Aunt Maisie’s face. The gladness died in him and he began to cry.

Now don’t you start blubbering, Aunt Maisie said. You’ll set me off again.
Big like a man and twenty years old, but you’re just a little old baby in your
head, poor soul.

Podcast: The Writer’s Voice

Listen to Lauren Groff read “To Sunland.”

No, ma’am. I’m a man, he said, and wiped his face.

Because he was much taller than her, she waited until he sat in the rocking
chair, then she leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. You be good, Buddy,
she said. Get down on your knees and pray every night like your mama
taught you. Don’t you be making no trouble, you hear?

Yes, ma’am, he said.

I’ll write you every week on Sunday and try to get myself up there to visit
once a month or so, depending on my money. You know I don’t make barely
enough for my own food and, besides, I’m getting old now, not doing so
good myself these days. Well, no more of that. In any event, don’t forget
there’s a soul in the world that loves you. That’s right, your Aunt Maisie
loves you, she said.

Yes, ma’am, he said.

She dug in her pocketbook and put a little note under the handle of his
suitcase. Now you be sure your sister sees that note whenever she turns up,
you hear? She smiled, but it wasn’t a smile, really.
Yes, ma’am, he said, and began moving in the rocking chair as she went
down the steps and into her car, and the headlights were too bright for a
minute, until she backed all the way out into the road and was gone.

He did not feel the cold so much when he rocked. He was soothed by the
orange blossoms hiding out there in the darkness, the golden rain of termites,
the noises of some night bird calling somewhere, the good rhythm of his
rocking. It was nice to see the way the sky began to take on a pale line at its
edge, then pink began to grow out of the pale line and spun up and out, and
he could see the orange groves out there coming clear in the new light. Then
the sun rose full, and though he knew enough not to look at it for very long,
he did look at it a little bit, and when he closed his eyes the sun shone in
echoing red on his lids. Now the fog was lifting up from the ground under
the trees and an animal he didn’t know the name of, shiny and hard-looking
with a long tail, moved slowly through the yard, sniffing at things.

Then, all at once, there was Joanie in the morning light in front of him, her
own suitcase in her hand and a little straw hat with a yellow band on her
head. She had walked up without him seeing or hearing her. She was
frowning a little. Hey there, Bud, she said. Aunt Maisie isn’t here with you?
She left you out here all by your lonesome? She jutted her chin at the house,
and he turned to look but there was no one there. Then she saw the note
under the suitcase’s handle and pulled it out and read it and gave a sharp
little laugh. She balled the note up and threw it down on the worn rubber
doormat.

She feels so dang strong about it, maybe she could’ve kept you herself,
Joanie said. That old bat-faced shrew. She took a white handkerchief out of
her pocketbook and spat on a corner, then rubbed at his face where he still
wore Aunt Maisie’s kiss. You ready to walk a bit? she said.

Yes, Joanie, he said, and stood and chuckled as the rocking chair rocked on
without him in it.

She took his suitcase in one hand and hers in the other and led him down the
path to the soft, thick dirt of the road. They went for a long time through the
stretch with laurel oak trees and palmettos on one side, the big plantation of
orange trees on the other. It was early enough that there was some shade, and
they kept to it. Joanie seemed to be thinking about something and didn’t
talk, which was all right, because he liked to watch her two braids snake
back and forth across her back as she walked.

When they got to the turnoff toward the fishing camp, she put the suitcases
down with a sigh and shook out her hands. At this rate, she said, we’re not
going to make the noon bus. Then she looked at him where he stood and
said, Hey, wait, what am I thinking? You’re pretty strong, right, Buddy?

Real strong, he said, and he picked up the suitcases as if they were nothing.

They went on through the sun spots and the shade and were almost at the
crossroads when a sound came from behind them, and a pickup barrelled
past in a big blow of dust. Then the truck stopped and blinked its back lights
and reversed toward them. Joanie swore under her breath and patted her hair
but was smiling when the driver rolled down his window. He was a red-
faced man with eyes hidden under the brim of his cap. Well, if it isn’t Joanie
Greene, the driver said.

In the flesh, she said. And her big old brother, Buddy. How you doing, Mr.
Summerlin? You’re not going into town, are you? I like your new truck.

Looks like I am now, he said. I was only driving around in my brand-new

baby, just now picked her up from the lot. She’s a ’56, last year’s model, so I
got her for a song. Anyways, since you’ve graduated you know you can call
me Harmon.

Thanks, Harmon, she said. Saving us a long, hot walk.

Toss them suitcases in the back and climb up right next to me, girl, he said.
You and your brother. How’s it going, Buddy? I heard a bunch of rumors
about you, but your mama kept you to her own self, didn’t she.

Yessir, Buddy said, and put the suitcases into the bed of the truck.

Speaking of which, the driver said as they climbed in and Joanie reached
across Buddy’s lap to close the door, I’m sorry for your loss, both of you.
Thank you, Joanie said. We didn’t get along so great all the time, but it’s still
not easy to lose a mother.

The truck started moving, and the wind felt so good on Buddy’s cheeks that
he closed his eyes. Joanie told the driver how their mother had barely left
them anything. The bank had come in and taken away the house, and Joanie
had to scramble to sell off everything before it was put out on the street.
Humiliating, she said. All my mama’s old-lady friends haggling with me
over little pieces of her embroidery, her clock, her teapot. Like vultures.
Trying to get as much out of me for as little money as possible.

Girl, the driver said, you know that if you need help all you got to do is ask.
We can work something out. And he looked at Buddy out of the corner of
his eye and slowly put one of his big red hands on Joanie’s knee.

Joanie laughed and didn’t pull her knee away. You’re a good guy, Harmon,
she said. But you see we got our suitcases. We’re getting out of this old
dump.

Where to? he said.

She said, Guess.

Huh, he said, and looked across at Buddy. Something new came into his
face, and he said, You taking him to the Colony up in Gainesville. That place
for the feebleminded and epileptic. Well, well. Isn’t that something.
Everybody always said how your mama should have done it years ago.

I am, yeah, she said. I wrote away and got a letter back that they’re holding a
place for him. They started calling it something else, though. Sunland.
Sounds softer.

And you staying up there? Harmon said. Getting yourself a job, becoming a
real career girl?

Nah, Joanie said, and a little smile played on her lips and she said, Surely
you remember how smart I am.
Top of your class, he said. A whip-cracker. Run rings around the rednecks in
this place.

Anyways. Last year I applied to all the ladies’ colleges up North and I got
my pick. Took the one that gave me a full scholarship, up there in Maine.
Then my mama got sick and they let me defer and come for the spring
semester. Got me a train ticket and a hundred-dollar bill and just a little more
to get me there and set up with books before school starts in about a week.

Jesus. Maine, he said. Practically the North Pole. You’re going to freeze
your little Florida fanny off, girl.

That’s the idea, she said. Give me igloos and whale blubber. I’d go to
another planet if I could.

Well, congratulations, Harmon said, and his hand slid a little farther up her
thigh and some of his fingers disappeared under her skirt. You know, I heard
about you, Joanie Greene. I know some people around here will be missing
you sorely.

She pushed his hand back down to her knee and said, Ah, Harmon, come on,
now.

They were nearing the barn at the edge of town that had a life-size plaster
bull on its roof, and Buddy leaned forward eagerly and put his finger on the
windshield and shouted out, Bull!

The other two laughed, and Joanie said, Yep, Buddy, that’s a bull. She took
Buddy’s big hand in her small one and squeezed it.

Hey, listen, the driver said too quickly as they came close to the bus station.
You got some time before the bus leaves, maybe we can drop Buddy off to
sit for a spell on a bench there and you and me can drive somewheres for a
little chat. Give you a goodbye to remember. Make you think of your old
home town in a positive light when you’re up there in Maine.

Joanie didn’t lose her smile, but it went tight and she said, Nah, thanks for
the offer, but we don’t have all that much time.
The truck stopped and she leaned over Buddy and opened the door and
pushed him out. Grab them suitcases, Bud, she said in a low voice, and then
she went around to the driver’s window and murmured there for a bit. Buddy
watched from the shade as the pleasantness fell off the driver’s face and he
began to look red and then angry, and then he pulled out his wallet and
handed over some bills to Joanie, who tucked them into her pocketbook. The
driver threw the pickup into reverse and drove away far too fast, spitting
dust up all over them again.

Never coming back to this old snake pit again, she said, might as well make
a little money setting fire to all my bridges. Still can’t believe they let that
old lecher work at the high school.

She sighed and smacked dust off her skirt and blouse and hat, and said,
Anyways, we got about a half hour, what do you say we go get ourselves a
milkshake, and led Buddy into the drugstore where their mother used to take
him for lunch after church on Sundays.

There was nobody in the drugstore besides the boy in the paper cap behind
the counter, who flushed when he saw Joanie come in. Hey there, Buddy! he
called out in a strange, strained voice. You here for your usual? Burger,
chocolate malted?

Oh, yes, please, Buddy said, putting down the suitcases and sitting on a
stool. His stomach rumbled loudly.

Hey there, Joanie, the boy said, flicking his eyes at her. Haven’t seen you for
a spell. You doing good? You looking good.

Well, I’m an orphan now. So not so good, I guess, she said dryly.

Ah, jeez. Oh, boy, the boy said, and his blush became almost purple. I’m so
sorry, Joanie. I didn’t know. Was wondering why your mama didn’t bring
Buddy in here this last month or so. Ah, man, I’m such a pumpkin head.
Listen, I’ll make it up to you. I’ll buy you lunch. It’s on me. Well, it’s on Mr.
Katz who owns the place, but he’ll never know. And the boy winked and
turned away and began fiddling with the grill, shaking his head once in a
while and hissing under his breath at his own stupidity.
Joanie smiled to herself then, but every time the boy stole a glance at her she
put a sad expression on her face.

Buddy looked at himself in the mirror behind the syrups. He liked his dark
hair and dark eyes, but he did not like the dust that was in his hair. It kept
being a surprise to him that it was Joanie next to him in the mirror, carefully
shaking the dirt out of her clothing and her hair and dabbing at her face with
a paper napkin, and not his mother. Every time, the surprise turned to pain.

The boy in the paper hat delivered two malteds, two burgers, and two fries,
and hovered as they ate. Buddy was so hungry he barely chewed, and Joanie
ate delicately, touching the corners of her mouth with her napkin after every
bite. When Buddy was done, he looked at her food so hard that she pushed it
over to him.

Wasn’t good? the boy said anxiously. You didn’t like it, Joanie?

Don’t you fret, Joanie said, it was wonderful. I just haven’t been eating
much recently and it takes only a few bites to fill me up.

Nice to hear you thought it was good, the boy said, but then the bells above
the door jingled and an old couple, arm in arm, came in and sat down on the
stools. He rolled his eyes and went over with his little pad of paper to take
their order.

Buddy finished all the food. Joanie wiped his face and hands. She slid off
the stool and dug into her pocketbook for a quarter. Then she reconsidered,
replaced the quarter, and put a dime on the counter.

Let’s go, she said to Buddy.

But they hadn’t gone more than a few steps before the boy rushed back to
where they’d sat and said, Hey, Joanie, hey, Joanie, wait a second, do you
maybe want to go out with me one of these days? I can borrow my brother’s
car. We’ll go for a drive, maybe get some dinner, maybe. Or go bowling or
fishing or something.

Joanie turned around with a broad smile on her face and said, Oh, I’d love
that, truly. Why don’t you just call my Aunt Maisie’s house for a date? She
don’t like me going out with boys, so she’ll try to tell you I don’t live there,
but don’t you listen, just keep calling and one day you’ll get me, not her.

Oh, great, Joanie, the boy said, I’ll do that. I’ll just keep calling for you.

You do that, she said, and she and Buddy went outside and Joanie laughed as
they crossed the road. Oh, boy, she said. Maisie’s going to get so mad.

“ . . . and white, not yellow. Block, not shredded. Aged, but not too aged that it doesn’t slice well.”
Cartoon by Julia Suits

Yes, Buddy said, and laughed, not because he understood but because his
sister was laughing and the sound made him happy.

But soon he saw that something was wrong, and he stopped and put down
the suitcase. Home is this way, he said slowly, pointing down the street full
of dusty magnolias. Church this way, he said, pointing at the big red brick
church on the corner.

Joanie shaded her eyes and looked at him and said gently, We’re not going to
church or home, Bud. We’re off on a bus to Gainesville.

Oh, he said. I don’t know that place.

Me neither, she said. Well, we lived up there when we was real little, but
when Daddy left Mama so sudden she took a strong dislike to the place,
brought us down to this dumb little nothing town.

I want Mama, Buddy said, and began to cry.

Ah, none of that, Buddy, she said, none of that right now. Big old boy
blubbering in the street. As if it’s not hard enough as it is. And she put the
suitcase back in his hand, and took his other hand and pulled him through
the parking lot to where the bus was already grumbling and people were
slowly climbing up into it.

The bus was broiling hot and they had to go halfway back to find a seat, but
Joanie said it’d be cool once they were moving and wind came through the
windows. She parked their suitcases on their laps, because, she said in a
whisper, you can’t trust none of the people who ride buses. All the people
you can trust already have their own cars and wouldn’t be caught dead in a
bus. Someday, she said dreamily, she was going to buy herself a great big
car, pearly colored, with leather so soft inside you’d think you were riding
along in a cool white bed.

But Buddy wasn’t listening, because among the people getting on the bus
was a woman with a great puff of red hair under a very tiny hat, and in one
hand she held a blue suitcase and in the other a golden cage with two crested
cockatiels in it. She was heavy, and gasping, and she stopped for a minute at
the seat opposite Buddy and Joanie’s, then scanned her options and sighed,
and put the cage next to the window and settled herself down.

The driver came on and took people’s quarters. Joanie cursed under her
breath but opened her little pocketbook and dug around for change. Bleeding
me dry, she said to Buddy. Guess I won’t be eating until I get to Maine.

The lady across the way overheard her, and said, Maine? You two running
off to Maine? I come up on this bus and I see you here and I think, Look at
that handsome boy, that pretty girl, I bet they’re sweethearts running off
together, how romantic. And I says to myself, Ada Severin, you sit yourself
down right next to them there, see if you can’t get their story, maybe you
know their people, but then the closer up to you I get, the more I see that no,
they’re not sweethearts, not at all, maybe they’re brother and sister, there’s a
family resemblance around the eyes, and then by the time I get here I see
clear that there’s something funny going on with that handsome boy right
there, maybe something not quite right up in his brain.

Don’t you say that. Everything’s just perfect in his brain, Joanie said sharply.
He’s all angels and rainbows up there. His gears are just a little slower than
most.

In any event, the lady said with a chesty sort of laugh, not often that I’m
wrong. Blessed Jesus has bestowed upon me the power of perception. I
always had it, I guess you’d say, but it got sharpened when I started reading
them Sherlock Holmes books in the library. What you do is you look real
hard at a person and see all the little things and then put them together. Like,
the bus driver has those deep scars on his hands, you see them? I bet he was
a turpentine cutter up in the pines for a long while. But he has a little hitch in
his walk, and I bet an accident happened and that’s why he started driving
buses.

Maybe so, Joanie said. Maybe not.

Say, the lady said in an excited voice, he’s coming back this way. Let’s see if
I’m right. She said to the bus driver, Pardon me, but we got a little wager
going that you used to be a turpentine cutter up in them pines once upon a
time.

The driver stopped in the aisle and looked down at the lady’s face for a long
moment. At last he said, gravely, I don’t believe I know you, ma’am, and
kept going to his seat at the front.

See? The lady crowed. Told you.

Neither confirmation nor denial, Joanie said. I think he gave you the old
mind your own beeswax.

Dear, no. I saw the confirmation plain as day there in his face, the lady said.
In any event, smells like someone around here’s been eating onions recently.
The Lord has blessed me with a powerful nose, can smell near on anything,
and there’s nothing worse than riding four hours on a bus with someone
who’s been eating onions. She opened her very tiny purse and took out a tin,
pulled the top off, delicately lifted away the paper with the tip of her finger
to reveal pale little lozenges inside. Violet candy? she offered.

And, since Joanie and Buddy had both eaten onions on their burgers, they
took one candy apiece.

Tastes like licking a plaster wall, Joanie said, making a face.

You’re welcome, the lady said. Took me a minute, but my perceptions about
you sure did come clear at last, the lady said.

Oh, yeah? Joanie said.

Yes, I can see you’re dumping your brother at that Farm Colony up in
Gainesville, and going on alone to Maine, ’cause you got you a job there.
The lady squinted, looking at Joanie’s shoes, her hands, her hair, her straw
hat, and said, I don’t know. Shopkeeper. No, no, I got it. Lady’s companion.

Something struggled in Joanie, but at last she said with a smile she tried to
bite down, Almost. Women’s college.

College girl. Well, I’ll be, the lady said. I myself begged and begged to go to
college, but my daddy said no, not even a Christian college, not even a
Home Economics course. Ada, honey, no amount of book reading can make
a woman a better housekeeper, he always said to me. But of course that was
a different time, before the first Great War, before women even got to vote
and then got all uppity and started yelling for things. Well, to tell you the
truth, I’m mighty envious of you going off to college. I would have loved to
learn about the old books and philosophers and such. Though I say, I always
do say, a woman’s place is in the home. She said this with such vehemence,
her chins wobbled.

One of the birds in the cage was sleeping, and the other was puffed up and
preening under its wings. It stopped when it saw Buddy staring at it and
shouted out, Red Peril!
The lady laughed. Oh, it just tickles me no end when he says that, she said. I
taught him that myself. It’s what all the boys used to call me back in the day,
not because I’m one of them Communists, of course not, but because of my
hair. She fluffed her hair with one plump hand and said, Red Peril. I know
you can’t see it, but I used to be pretty as you, my girl.

I believe it if you say it, Joanie said. The bus had started moving through the
long yellow afternoon, and the air blowing through the windows came as a
great relief.

In any event, the lady said, college girl, let’s see if you got the power of
perception like me. Bet you can’t take a look at me and tell my story the way
I did with the bus driver and you.

All right, Joanie said, and she put on a very serious face and looked the
woman over slowly and so hard that her eyes began to cross. At last, in a
spooky voice, she said, You teach piano up in Gainesville. You come down
here for a week every year to visit your sister but couldn’t leave your birds
behind because you’re a spinster, and you live all alone in your little
apartment up there. You and your sister don’t get along at all, because of the
bad blood between you. Your sister is still mad, deep down, that your daddy
left the house up in town to you when he died and all she got was a bunch of
fields full of nothing down in these parts. You spent the whole week playing
solitaire in different rooms and quarrelling over what you wanted to eat for
supper.

The lady gaped at Joanie, her little eyes blinking fast. At last she said, Bless
me. I’m a widow, not a spinster, but besides that, you’re dead on. You’re a
natural, just like me.

Joanie laughed and said, Nah. My mama used to clean the house for your
sister’s neighbor, old Mr. Hubbard. Your sister would complain about your
visits for weeks before you came down.

Oh, what a dirty trick! the lady cried out, her cheeks turning red. How un-
Christian of you. But I don’t know what I should have expected from a girl
who is throwing away her own brother like he’s trash.
And then she turned her face indignantly toward the front of the bus and
bellowed for all to hear, A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for
adversity. Proverbs.

I’m seventeen, lady, Joanie said angrily. How the heck can I take care of a
big old jug of molasses like him? Anyways, I was just having a little fun,
Joanie said in a sweeter voice, but the lady had set her angry face toward her
birds and her own window, where Florida was rushing by.

Joanie lowered her face to Buddy’s shoulder and tried to muffle her laughter.
Soon, though, she just rested her head there, and her eyes slowly closed and
she fell asleep.

After some time, the lady with the birds extracted a peeled hard-boiled egg
from her bag, opened a sheet of paper carefully, and dipped every bit of the
white of the egg into the salt and pepper there. Buddy liked the way the lady
ate the egg, in tiny fast bites, leaving the golden center for the end, which
she rolled in the last of the salt and pepper and let sit in her mouth until it
dissolved. Then she, too, fell asleep and her snores, high in her nose, rose up
and down in the air of the bus.

Buddy liked everything about the bus right now: the feel of his sister’s head
on his shoulder and the smell of her hair; the way that the bumps in the road
made the flesh of the woman with the birds jiggle; the way that the birds
swayed inside the cage on their strange sharp feet and bobbed their pretty
crests and let their eyes go to slits. Through the window, when he let his
eyes unfocus, the desperate scrabbling cypresses with their feet in the water
became a blur of gray and shining brown, and the palmettos spun a green
weave. They stopped at each little town along the way, but when the bus
picked up speed again everything flashed gold and green and brown and
blue, over and over, and the sun began to lower itself and upon his hands the
hot yellow sunlight of late afternoon began to spread.

It was then that something caught Buddy’s attention. Rather, it was the lack
of something, for the bird lady’s high snoring had stopped and a strange
silence had overtaken the bus. He turned his head to look at the bird lady.
She was wearing a serious face and leaning into the aisle. Now he saw that
she was leaning over his sister’s pocketbook, which, though the strap was
still slung across her shoulder, had fallen off her lap and into the aisle. He
saw the lady put her hand inside the pocketbook. Slowly, she pulled the roll
of cash from it and held it in her hand, smiling. But then she looked up and
saw Buddy watching her. Her face flushed and she blinked her eyes fast and
licked her lips, then she peeled a bill away from the roll and shoved the rest
back into the pocketbook, and closed the clasp with nimble fingers.

Just having a little joke, she whispered. Just some fun, no harm, she said,
and tucked the bill she had taken down the neck of her blouse. She put a
finger to her lips and went, Shush.

Joanie, Buddy said, shaking his sister.

Hush now, don’t wake her, the lady said. Poor girl looks awful tired, she
needs a rest. She took the paper bag of food that was squeezed between
herself and the birdcage and tried to hand it to him. I got some nice ham
sandwiches in there for you, she said, coaxingly. I don’t even like ham, but
my sister made me take them. There’s some pecan sandies there, too. You
like cookies? Everyone likes cookies.

Joanie, he said, but was distracted by the smell of the ham from the bag that
the lady had dropped on his lap.

Anyways, the lady said, she won’t miss it in the long run. Pretty girl like her
can always find a way to make a little money. She smiled, and there was
lipstick all over her large front teeth.

Hey, Joanie, Buddy said with less conviction now, but his sister was sleeping
hard and it took him a while to awaken her, and the bus was slowing,
turning, and when she finally opened her eyes and wiped her mouth they had
stopped at the station and he had forgotten what he wanted to tell her.

Before the bus even came to a halt, the bird lady had stood and pushed her
way down the aisle with her cage and her suitcase so that she would be the
first off, ahead of all the people who sat in the front of the bus.

Let me tell you, Joanie said, smoothing down her hair, which the air through
the windows had ruffled, and looking at the lady who stood there so large at
the front of the bus, Busybodies like that nasty old thing I certainly will not
be missing up in Maine. From what I hear, them Yankees keep to
themselves, as well they should.

They came off the bus into the long shadows of afternoon, the high spiky
palm trees and the heritage oaks broad and dripping with moss. They took
turns using the facilities at the bus station. While Buddy was waiting outside
with the suitcases, and Joanie was inside the restroom, there came a terrible
shriek and she ran out without even washing her hands. It’s gone, she said.
It’s gone. I looked in my pocketbook for a comb and my hundred-dollar bill
is gone. I’m never going to be able to buy my books and such now. And she
sat down on her suitcase and screamed, low, into her hands.

Buddy sat beside her on his own suitcase and put his arm around her and
began to cry, because he missed his mother so.

There were other people in the station walking around, but nobody bothered
them. At last Joanie stopped screaming into her hands and got up and went
back into the bathroom to wash her face, and when she came out she seemed
somehow smaller and her face was blotchy but set.

What’s that? she said, seeing the paper bag of food on his lap.

Bird lady give it to me, he said.

She opened the bag and whistled. Enough food here for days, she said. She
looked at him. They’ll be feeding you where you’re going. Three square,
they said. You mind if I take this, Bud? It’ll feed me all the way until I get
where I’m going, and she didn’t wait to hear what he said, but just packed it
into her suitcase.

Ham in there, he said sadly, his stomach feeling empty. And cookies.

We got about a mile to walk, she said. You still feeling pretty strong, Buddy?
she said.

Real strong, Buddy said, and took both of the suitcases and set off again,
following his sister through the late afternoon.
Buddy liked the neighborhoods they were walking through, the big wooden
houses with their porches, all the people out walking their dogs. There were
young people, too, in twos and threes, and when Joanie watched them
something that had died in her face back at the station came alive again. Bet
they’re students up at the university, she murmured. Bet they’re out here
because their brains are too stuffed with symphonies and history and
classical Greek and they got to walk it all out to be able to sleep at night.
And she smiled at Buddy and said kindly, In some ways, you’re going off to
your kind of college, too, I guess.

There was still light in the air when they crossed the big road and saw the
sign. The name change was so recent that the blasted old board with “Florida
Farm Colony for Epileptic and Mentally Deficient Children” still hung on
the left, while on the right there was a fresh-painted sign that said
“Sunland.”

Sunland, Joanie said, that’s right, that’s what they’re calling it now. Doesn’t
that sound nice, Buddy. A land of sun.

That’s where Mama’s at, Joanie? Buddy said, and Joanie looked at him and
her whole body started to shake. No, baby, she said, Mama’s not there.

Then she said soft and fast to herself, Oh, my God, what am I doing? What
am I doing? Mama always said she had me to take care of you in case
something happened to her, and look what I’m doing.

But Buddy had turned eagerly toward the place, and was now walking fast
up to the gate where the guard was snoozing in his hut, a little transistor
radio playing beside him. Wait, Buddy, Joanie called out behind him.

You must be Robert, ain’t you, boy? the guard said. I was beginning to
despair for you. They said you was coming today, but it’s near time to lock
the gates. And here you are.

Here I am, Buddy said. I’m Buddy.

Fifteen more minutes and you woulda had to find a place to stay for the
night, come back in the morning, the guard said to Joanie.
I’m sorry, sir, she said. She was pale all over, even in her lips.

The guard spoke into his walkie-talkie, and a garbled sound came back out.

Through the gate they could see straight lines of sago palms and oleanders,
lights on in the windows of the great plain white wooden buildings scattered
around on the sparse grass. Buddy grasped the gate and pressed his face
painfully between the metal bars to look harder. One of the doors of the
closest building opened and out of it three figures in white appeared and
began to descend the stairs, shining backlit in the warm light that poured out
from inside and painted the grass and the trees framing the building with
gold.

Oh, Buddy breathed, because the sight was beautiful to him.

Bud, listen to me, Joanie said quickly beside him. I’ll come back for you. I’ll
get my education, then I’ll get my job, and when I have enough money to
support us both I’ll come back to get you. Oh, Lord, forgive me.

But Buddy wasn’t listening. He was watching the three stout women in
white coming closer to him across the path. From this distance he couldn’t
see their faces. Any one of them could be his mama. The early moon hung in
the blue of the end of the day above, and, in the distance, a cat darted swiftly
across the grounds, and Joanie, who smelled like sweat and onions and like
herself, rose up on her toes and kissed his cheek. The evening breeze lifted
from across the farm fields with its warm smell of cows and dirt and touched
him on his face and hands and neck, and in the smell there was something
wilder, something off the wet and teeming prairie a few miles away, with its
dark, terrible beasts below the water, the delicate angelic birds on their long,
thin legs above. In this moment, something inside him that was always
singing, that nobody else could hear, sang louder, sang until the women
came so close that at last they showed their faces. Then Joanie, whom he
looked at, trying to understand, turned her own face from him and began to
walk away, fast, and did not look back. ♦
In Miniature

How to Split Custody of a One-Inch-Tall Talking Shell

By Rachel Syme

Twelve years ago, the filmmaker Dean Fleischer Camp and the actress Jenny
Slate, who were dating, went to a destination wedding. Their teeny hotel
room, shared with five friends, was preposterously cramped, and Slate began
to complain about the sardine-like conditions in a small, squeaky voice. She
spontaneously named this voice Marcel; Camp had decided it belonged to a
seashell so itsy-bitsy that it used a muffin as a mattress. When the pair
returned home to New York, Slate couldn’t stop speaking as Marcel or
inventing details about his life, such as the fact that he kept a piece of lint as
a dog or used discarded human toenails as skis. When Camp was hired to
shoot a short video for a comedy show, he bought a bag of googly-eyes, an
off-brand Polly Pocket doll (for the shoes), and a one-inch-tall, pearlescent
hermit-crab shell. The resulting short stop-motion film, “Marcel the Shell
with Shoes On,” was a viral hit on YouTube. Hollywood offers rolled in, but
most of them didn’t feel right.

“One studio recommended that we partner him with Ryan Reynolds and they
fight crime,” Camp said the other day, while sitting in the café at the
Museum of the City of New York, in East Harlem. “I probably would watch
that movie on an airplane, but no.” Camp was at the museum to see the
Stettheimer Dollhouse, another laborious study in miniatures. He was
wearing a navy patterned button-down and wire-framed spectacles. He had a
nice Friday planned. Later, he was going to meet his girlfriend and his
parents at the Grand Central Oyster Bar.

Slate and Camp ended up spending seven years working on the “Marcel”
feature film, which premièred last week. During that span, they got married
and then un-married. “When we were getting divorced and still working on
this, I think our friends were, like, ‘That seems very weird,’ ” Camp said.
The film follows Marcel as he scuttles around a house populated by a
rotating crop of Airbnb guests. He’s a lonesome shell; a former tenant had
inadvertently kidnapped his friends and family while emptying a sock
drawer. Marcel recounts this woeful tale to Camp (playing himself), who is
renting the house after a relationship meltdown. “We wrote the story before
we separated,” Camp said. “But I kind of always find that things that I make
tell the future.”

He headed into the exhibition hall. The doll house—a twelve-room, Gilded
Age mini-manse—was the creation of Carrie Walter Stettheimer, a
Manhattan socialite. (Her sister Florine was a celebrated painter.) She began
the project in 1916, and it took over her life for the next two decades.

Peering inside the chinoiserie sitting room—wee mah-jongg set, shelves of

books micro-inscribed with authors’ names—Camp let out a delighted gasp.
“My main feelings about working in miniature are that I have ham hocks for
fingers,” he said. He lingered on the kitchen scene, which featured a plate of
diminutive pears distressed to look as if they had just begun to rot. “It’s so
impressive when you see patina,” he said. “It’s a constant thing with Marcel,
because he’s not supposed to have anything that’s new.”

Camp wanted Marcel’s world to be invented entirely of human detritus. He

climbs walls by dipping his feet into honey. He uses a spoon as a catapult, a
Tootsie Roll wrapper as a parachute, and a stand mixer tied to a string to
shake fruit loose from tree branches. For exercise, he ice-skates on a dusty
coffee table. Camp pointed out a bannister inside the Stettheimer house
which appeared to be made of pint-size toilet plungers. “That looks Marcel-
y,” he said. “Like, repurposed garbage from the human world made into
other things.”
Camp turned the corner and his eyes grew wide at the sight of a miniature
art gallery inside the doll house, featuring original vest-pocket works by
some of Stettheimer’s artist pals—Marcel Duchamp, Gaston Lachaise.
“Probably the pleasure of making this was researching all these things with
her art friends,” Camp said. He looked wistful.

Talk turned back to Slate. “It’s very easy for us to slip back into collaborator
mode,” he said. “We met working together, we made tons of stuff before we
started dating a million years ago, and we continue to make stuff today.”

Oysters beckoned. Camp made for the exit. As he left, he said, “I want kids
to go home and feel like they could find Marcel behind a pillow—like, it
should feel that real. And part of that was about making sure it was real for
us, too.” ♦

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described an aspect of Marcel’s

origin story.
Letter from Budapest

Does Hungary Offer a Glimpse of Our Authoritarian

Future?
By Andrew Marantz

Content

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

The Republican Party hasn’t adopted a new platform since 2016, so if you
want to know what its most influential figures are trying to achieve—what,
exactly, they have in mind when they talk about an America finally made
great again—you’ll need to look elsewhere for clues. You could listen to
Donald Trump, the Party’s de-facto standard-bearer, except that nobody
seems to have a handle on what his policy goals are, not even Donald
Trump. You could listen to the main aspirants to his throne, such as
Governor Ron DeSantis, of Florida, but this would reveal less about what
they’re for than about what they’re against: overeducated élites, apart from
themselves and their allies; “wokeness,” whatever they’re taking that to
mean at the moment; the overzealous wielding of government power, unless
their side is doing the wielding. Besides, one person can tell you only so
much. A more efficient way to gauge the current mood of the Party is to
spend a weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference, better
known as CPAC.

On a Friday in February, I arrived at the Rosen Shingle Creek resort, in

Orlando. It was a temperate afternoon, and the Party faithful were spending
it indoors, in the air-conditioning. I walked into a rotunda with potted palm
trees and chaotically patterned carpeting. Shabbat services were about to
begin, and a minyan of young men, give or take, roamed around in MAGA-
themed yarmulkes. The CPAC dress code was big-tent: pants suits,
sweatsuits, bow ties, bolos—anything, pretty much, except for an N95. A
merch kiosk near the entrance sold Nancy Pelosi toilet paper, gold-
sequinned purses shaped like handguns, and Trump 2024 T-shirts in every
size and color. Even the staircases were sponsored—one by Fox News and
another by Gettr, a social-media platform founded by Trump-campaign
alumni. If you aligned yourself with it at just the right vantage, you could
parse Gettr’s slogan, “Making Social Media Fun Again!” Otherwise, it
looked like red-white-and-blue gibberish.

“Trump Before Trump”

Andrew Marantz discusses the American right’s embrace of Viktor Orbán,
on The New Yorker Radio Hour.

Political rallies are for red-meat applause lines; think-tank conferences are
for more measured policy discussions. The American Conservative Union,
the group that organizes CPAC, tries to have it both ways. On Saturday, I
spent a while in the main ballroom, watching a panel called “Put Him to
Bed, Lock Her Up and Send Her to the Border.” “Him” referred to Joe
Biden, “the hair-sniffing dementia patient in the White House”; the first
“her,” of course, was Hillary Clinton; the second was Kamala Harris, who
was lambasted as both an “empty pants suit” and a wily “Cersei Lannister.”
That afternoon, Trump arrived, hosted a V.I.P. gathering featuring a spread
of Big Macs under heat lamps, and took the stage, giving a ninety-minute
stump speech to an ecstatic crowd, all but confirming his intention to run for
President again.

The policy discussions were mainly tucked away upstairs, in conference

rooms with a tiny fraction of the foot traffic. One panel, on European
populism, was called “More Brexits?” The moderator, an American named
James Carafano, introduced the first speaker: Miklós Szánthó, the director of
a Hungarian think tank called the Center for Fundamental Rights.
(According to Átlátszó, an investigative-journalism outlet in Hungary, the
Center for Fundamental Rights is secretly funded by the Hungarian
government.) “He’s a real European,” Carafano, a foreign-policy analyst at
the Heritage Foundation, said. “I know that because I saw him in Europe!”

For decades, at conferences like CPAC, international exchanges were mostly

assumed to flow in one direction: Americans exporting their largesse, and
their ideology, to the rest of the world. At the first CPAC, in 1974, the
keynote speaker, Governor Ronald Reagan, gave a rousing address about
soldiers who had shed their “American-melting-pot blood in every corner of
the world, usually in defense of someone’s freedom.” In recent years, as the
future of the Republican Party has seemed increasingly up for grabs,
American conservatives have shown more willingness to look abroad for
ideas that they might want to try out back home.

Szánthó, a stout man with a smartly tailored suit and a waxed mustache,
began by quibbling with the panel’s title. “There will be no so-called Huxit,”
he said, despite his country’s disagreements with “the deep state of
Brussels.” Szánthó lives in Hungary, but he spoke fluent Fox News-inflected
English. “When it comes to border protection, when it comes to the Jewish-
Christian heritage of the Continent and of the European Union, or when it
comes to gender ideology,” he continued, the Hungarians, nearly alone
among citizens of Western nations, “step up for conservative values.”

Hungary has a population comparable to Michigan’s and a G.D.P. close to

that of Arkansas, but, in the imagination of the American right, it punches
far above its weight. Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister since 2010, is now
the longest-serving head of state in the European Union, and one of the most
fiercely nativist and traditionalist. Starting in 2013, he made a political foil
out of George Soros, the Jewish financier who was born in Hungary but
hasn’t lived there in decades, exploiting the trope of Soros as a nefarious
international puppet master. During the refugee crisis of 2015, Orbán built a
militarized fence along Hungary’s southern border, and, in defiance of both
E.U. law and the Geneva Conventions, expelled almost all asylum seekers
from the country. Relative to other European nations, Hungary hadn’t
experienced a big influx of migrants. (Out-migration is actually more
common.) But the refugees, most of them from Syria or other parts of the
Middle East, were an effective political scapegoat—one that Orbán
continues to flog, along with academics, “globalists,” the Roma, and, more
recently, queer and trans people. Last year, Hungary passed a law banning
sex education involving L.G.B.T.Q. topics in schools. Nine months later, in
Florida, DeSantis signed a similar law, known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
DeSantis’s press secretary, talking about the inspiration for the law,
reportedly said, “We were watching the Hungarians.”

Experts have described Orbán as a new-school despot, a soft autocrat, an

anocrat, and a reactionary populist. Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of
international affairs at Princeton, has referred to him as “the ultimate twenty-
first-century dictator.” Some prominent American conservatives want
nothing to do with him; but more have taken his side, pointing to Hungary as
a potential model for America’s future. That afternoon, on the CPAC main
stage, Dan Schneider, the executive director of the American Conservative
Union, singled out Orbán for praise: “If you cannot protect your own
borders, if you cannot protect your own sovereignty, none of the other rights
can be protected. That’s what the Prime Minister of Hungary understands.”
The house lights dimmed and a sort of political trailer played, set to
melodramatic music. “For over a millennium, to be Hungarian meant to sail
the rough seas of history,” a narrator intoned over a horror-movie-style
montage: Mongol invaders, migrant caravans, a glowering George Soros,
drag-queen story time.

“Are you sure you want a jury of your peers?”

Cartoon by Navied Mahdavian

The lights came up, and Szánthó walked to the lectern, waving stiffly.
“Hungary has fought wars, suffered unthinkable oppression, to gain and
regain our liberty,” he said. In the current war, he went on, the enemy was
“woke totalitarianism,” personified by George Soros (he paused for boos);
the hero was “one of the true champions of liberty, a man you know well,
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán” (a generous round of applause). He praised
“President Trump” and tried to initiate a cheer of “Let’s go Brandon,” a
substitute for “Fuck Joe Biden” used by right-wing culture warriors who
spend too much time on the Internet. He quoted the old chestnut “Hard times
create strong men,” although, the way he said it, it sounded like
“strongmen.” And he invited the audience to join him at the next CPAC
conference, the first to be hosted on European soil: CPAC Hungary.

“You do not have to have emergency powers or a military coup for

democracy to wither,” Aziz Huq, a constitutional-law professor at the
University of Chicago, told me. “Most recent cases of backsliding, Hungary
being a classic example, have occurred through legal means.” Orbán runs for
reëlection every four years. In theory, there is a chance that he could lose. In
practice, he has so thoroughly rigged the system that his grip on power is
virtually assured. The political-science term for this is “competitive
authoritarianism.” Most scholarly books about democratic backsliding (“The
New Despotism,” “Democracy Rules,” “How Democracies Die”) cite
Hungary, along with Brazil and Turkey, as countries that were consolidated
democracies, for a while, before they started turning back the clock.

Szánthó mentioned “Jewish-Christian heritage,” but there aren’t many

practicing Jews left in Hungary. Orbán, in his speeches, often uses the
phrase “Christian democracy,” which he portrays as under continual
existential threat. Given that the vast majority of Hungarians, apparently
including Orbán, do not attend church regularly, it seems plausible that his
audience hears the word “Christian,” at least in part, as code for something
else. “If we manage to uphold our country’s ethnic homogeneity and its
cultural uniformity,” he said in 2017, “Hungary will be the kind of place that
will be able to show other, more developed countries what they lost.” His
constant theme is that only he can preserve Hungary for the (non-Muslim,
ethnically Magyar) Hungarians—about as close as any European head of
state will come to an explicit rejection of ethnic pluralism in favor of state-
sanctioned white nationalism. For many of his American admirers, this
seems to be a core element of his appeal. Lauren Stokes, a professor of
European history at Northwestern University, told me, “The offer Orbán is
making to global conservatives is: I alone can save you from the ravages of
Islamization and totalitarian progressivism—and, in the face of all that, who
has time for checks and balances and rules?”

In recent years, Orbán or institutions affiliated with his government have

hosted, among others, Mike Pence, the former Vice-President; new-media
agitators including Steve Bannon, Dennis Prager, and Milo Yiannopoulos;
and Jeff Sessions, the former Attorney General, who told a Hungarian
newspaper that, in the struggle to “return to our Christian roots based on
reason and law, which have made Western civilization great . . . the
Hungarians have a solid stand.” In his hilltop office with an imposing two-
story library, Orbán has met with conservative figures including Patrick
Deneen and Jordan Peterson. “If these people think the extreme left is
hijacking American society in dangerous ways, then, yes, I agree,” the
conservative writer Andrew Sullivan told me. “But to go from that to ‘Let’s
embrace this authoritarian leader in this backwater European country, and
maybe try out a version of that model with our own charismatic leader back
home’—I mean, that leap is just weird, and frankly stupid.”

In Orlando, I followed the energy of the crowd to media row, where

Sebastian Gorka, a bellicose conspiracy barker with a Vandyke beard, was
doing a live broadcast of his radio show, “America First.” In the nineties and
early two-thousands, Gorka was a Hungarian politician and government
adviser; in 2017, he served as a counterterrorism adviser in the Trump
Administration, focussing on “radical Islamist ideology.” (He did not have
the credentials that most comparable appointees have held; he had, however,
worn a medal from the Order of Vitéz, a Hungarian military society
historically associated with the Nazis.) “What would you like to hear from
tomorrow’s speech by the President?” he asked Representatives Matt Gaetz
and Marjorie Taylor Greene. (He meant, of course, Trump, whom he
generally referred to as “my former boss.”) Greene replied, “I want to hear
him say that his entire policy, his entire agenda, is for our country, our
country only, and the rest of the world can frankly go to hell.” Gorka, who
was born in London to Hungarian parents, said, “I like that menu.” He
dismissed Gaetz and Greene and introduced his next “big-ticket guest”: Kyle
Rittenhouse. Later, I ran into Gorka, who was now wearing a tuxedo, and
asked him for an interview. He declined. (To be specific, he shouted, “Go to
hell, scumbag,” and “You’re smoking crack.”)

I saw him the next day in the V.I.P. lounge, near a spread that was both
lavish and pedestrian: silver, scalloped carafes of coffee with Starbucks to-
go cups; a tureen of lukewarm fettuccine Alfredo. (My press pass did not
technically allow me access to the V.I.P. lounge, but CPAC, as it turned out,
did not have very tight border security.) A graffiti-style portrait of Trump
hugging and kissing an American flag, just auctioned off for more than
twelve thousand dollars, was propped against a cardboard box and a pile of
plastic wrap, waiting to be shipped to the lucky winner. J. D. Vance, a
former anti-Trump venture capitalist who had rebranded himself as a pro-
Trump salt-of-the-earth Senate candidate, chatted with Eric Bolling, a news
anchor who left Fox News amid allegations of sexual harassment, which he
denied, and was later hired by Newsmax. The pro-Brexit politician Nigel
Farage waited in the buffet line next to Devin Nunes, a former member of
Congress who now runs Trump’s struggling media company. Father Frank
Pavone, a Catholic priest wearing his clerical collar, chatted with Todd
Starnes, a pundit whose Fox News contract wasn’t renewed after he
appeared to endorse the view that Democrats may worship Moloch, the
Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice. “The networking here is
amazing!” Pavone said.

In the hallway, I shook hands with Szánthó and Schneider, the two lead
organizers of CPAC Hungary, and told them that I planned to fly to Budapest
to cover it. “You will be welcome,” Szánthó said. “Please just send an e-
mail.” One of the speakers on the European-populism panel had been
Raymond Ibrahim, an independent scholar from California who contributes
to a variety of right-wing outlets, usually to argue that Islam is a global
scourge. “The word ‘multiculturalism,’ it sounds nice, but what is exactly
the culture?” he said during the panel. “Things like polygamy . . . or killing
the apostate . . . these are the culture of Islam.” Ibrahim exchanged phone
numbers with Gorka, and they later started texting, as Ibrahim told me,
“mostly about Islam, and about how Hungary’s fighting back.” A few days
after the conference, Gorka, on his show, interviewed the chairman of the
A.C.U., who plugged CPAC Hungary. “It’s no longer about policies,” Gorka
said, paraphrasing something another conservative leader had told him at
CPAC. “Now, as a movement, we have to take back the Republic, and we
have to take back our civilization.”

I got to Budapest on May 16th, the day Viktor Orbán was sworn in for his
fourth consecutive term as Prime Minister. “Congratulations to him,” a
Hungarian journalist named Gábor Miklósi said. “What an achievement.”
This was sarcasm—a dark, dense form of sarcasm, polished from years of
use.

We were having a beer at a “ruin bar” in what is still known as the Jewish
district, a neighborhood that the Nazis turned into a ghetto in 1944. (In the
course of two months, with the collaboration of the Hungarian government,
the Nazis deported nearly half a million Jews from this ghetto to Auschwitz;
others were later lined up on the banks of the Danube and shot.) Miklósi—
slightly stooped, perennially tired—is an editor at 444, one of the few
independent news outlets left in Hungary. “He controls most of the national
papers, most of the radio and TV stations, all the local papers in the
countryside,” Miklósi said. “He doesn’t do it in obvious ways—he does it
slowly, by putting his cronies in charge, or by subtly making life difficult for
his critics. But eventually he gets what he wants.” The “he,” of course, was
Orbán, who is, like all despots, his country’s default antecedent, the implied
subject of virtually every sentence.

From the nineteen-fifties through the nineteen-eighties, during the period

when Hungary was within the Soviet sphere of influence, Moscow allowed
it a bit more latitude than other Eastern Bloc countries, a unique mixture of
subjection and relative exemption that came to be known as Goulash
Communism. As the Iron Curtain began to lift, Orbán emerged as a leader of
the youth resistance, giving impassioned speeches against totalitarianism; in
1989, he went to Oxford to study political philosophy, on George Soros’s
dime. During his first term as Prime Minister, starting in 1998, Orbán, who
still identified as a liberal democrat, vowed to build up the country’s civic
infrastructure. President Bill Clinton hosted him at the White House,
extolling Orbán’s “youthful and vigorous and progressive leadership.” Then,
in 2002, Orbán lost a reëlection campaign to a Socialist coalition and,
according to the biographer József Debreczeni, resolved to return to power
and change “the rules of the game” so that he would never lose again.

He enlisted Arthur Finkelstein, a political consultant from Brooklyn who

had worked to elect Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and Ronald Reagan,
among others. “Try to polarize the election around that issue which cuts best
in your direction, i.e., drugs, crime, race,” Finkelstein wrote in a 1970 memo
to the Nixon White House. In 1996, Finkelstein put this principle to work on
behalf of Benjamin Netanyahu, a candidate for Prime Minister of Israel who
was then about twenty points down in the polls, and who started alleging
that his opponent, Shimon Peres, planned to divide Jerusalem. This was a
lie, but it stuck, and Netanyahu won. In 2008, Netanyahu introduced
Finkelstein to his friend Orbán; Finkelstein became so indispensable that
Orbán reportedly came to refer to him, dotingly, as Finkie. One of
Finkelstein’s protégés later told the Swiss journalist Hannes Grassegger,
“Arthur always said that you did not fight against the Nazis but against
Adolf Hitler.” Orbán had been running against globalism, multiculturalism,
bureaucracy in Brussels. These were abstractions. By 2013, Finkelstein had
an epiphany: the face of the enemy should be George Soros.
After Orbán returned to power, his rhetoric grew more sharply nativist, laden
with Islamophobic and anti-Semitic dog whistles: “We are fighting an
enemy that is different from us. Not open but hiding; not straightforward but
crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in
working but speculates with money.” In 2018, several parties to the left of
Orbán’s, and even a couple of neo-Fascist parties to his right, ran separate
candidates for Prime Minister, splitting the opposition vote. “After that, the
common narrative was that next time all we had to do was unite behind one
opposition candidate, and we would definitely win,” Szilárd Pap, a left-wing
writer, told me. “Well, we did unite the next time, and we lost even worse.”
In Budapest, I met plenty of Hungarians who openly railed against their
government. One was Péter Márki-Zay, the opposition candidate in the most
recent election. Márki-Zay continues to accuse Orbán of corruption and
mendacity, and he doesn’t seem worried that his sushi will be poisoned with
polonium. The regime’s defenders see this relative freedom as evidence that
all the talk of autocracy is reckless alarmism. Its critics see it as evidence of
a cost-benefit decision: certain egregious breaches are not worth the trouble,
at least for now.

“Orbán has managed to preserve the appearance of formal democracy, as

long as you don’t look too closely,” Anna Grzymala-Busse, the director of
the Europe Center at Stanford, told me. Since 2010, most of Hungary’s civic
institutions—the courts, the universities, the systems for administering
elections—have come to occupy a gray area. They haven’t been eradicated;
instead, they’ve been patiently debilitated, delegitimatized, hollowed out.
There are still judges who wear robes, but if Orbán finds their decisions too
onerous he can appeal to friendlier courts. There are still a few independent
universities, but the most prestigious one—Central European University,
which was founded by Soros—has been pushed out of the country, and
many of the public universities have been put under the control of oligarchs
and other loyalists. There are still elections, yet international observers
consider them “free but not fair”: radically gerrymandered, flush with
undisclosed infusions of dark money. The system that Orbán has built during
the past twelve years, a combination of freedom and subjugation not exactly
like that of any other government in the world, could be called Goulash
Authoritarianism. Scheppele contends that Orbán has pulled this off not by
breaking laws but by ingeniously manipulating them, in what she calls a
“constitutional coup.” She added, “He’s very smart and methodical. First, he
changes the laws to give himself permission to do what he wants, and then
he does it.”

“This is really boring—why can’t we stake out from home?”

Cartoon by Kim Warp

On the day I arrived, Orbán delivered a forty-five-minute speech in a gilded

neo-Gothic chamber of the Hungarian Parliament Building, warning that
Europe was entering “an age of danger,” and that Hungary, “the last
Christian conservative bastion of the Western world,” was one of the only
nations prepared to weather it. He predicted that, given the pandemic, the
war in Ukraine, and an incipient energy crisis, “migration toward rich
countries will intensify with tectonic force.” If other Western nations
continued to implement “waves of suicidal policy,” such as lax border
control, the result would be “the great European population-replacement
program, which seeks to replace the missing European Christian children
with migrants, with adults arriving from other civilizations”—a clear
reference to the racist talking point known as the great replacement theory.
A few years ago, this idea was propounded most visibly by white-power
extremists such as the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik (or, more
recently, the shooter in Buffalo). It’s now routinely parroted by the Fox
News host Tucker Carlson, many leading Republican politicians, and, in
Hungary, the head of state.
In 2010, Fidesz, Orbán’s party, won more than two-thirds of the seats in
Parliament, above the threshold required to amend the constitution. Within a
year, it had made a dozen amendments; when these didn’t provide enough
latitude, it threw out that constitution and wrote another one. In 2022, Fidesz
won a supermajority once again. I asked Miklósi whether the next four years
of Orbán’s reign would be different from the last. “It always gets worse,” he
said. This time, he wasn’t being sarcastic.

Of all the Anglophone Orbán apologists, surely the most genial, and
arguably the most influential, is a British journalist named John O’Sullivan,
who turned eighty in April. When William F. Buckley retired as the editor of
National Review, in the eighties, O’Sullivan took over. During Margaret
Thatcher’s third term as Prime Minister, he was one of her top advisers; after
she left office, he helped her write her memoirs. “Mrs. T. would take us on
these lovely trips to various places—a manor in the South of England, a villa
in the Bahamas—and we would talk over breakfast about some episode in
her life, and then we’d each go off and write,” he recalled. “It was great
fun.”

O’Sullivan had invited me to lunch at an Italian bistro near his apartment in

Budapest. (He still fancies himself a classical liberal, at least insofar as “I’m
always up for a good chat, even one that may involve disagreement.”) He is
known for knowing everyone, and he drops names with an equanimous
smile, describing people on a spectrum from “a good friend” to “a friend” to
“an ex-friend.” He wore a pin-striped suit and a tie from Liberty, the London
clothier once favored by Oscar Wilde. Even in this, O’Sullivan can’t help
but out-conservative the conservatives: “I prefer the older patterns, I confess,
most of which they’ve now discontinued.”

In 2008, O’Sullivan moved to Prague to help run Radio Free Europe; in

2013, two Hungarian friends, a “well-known modernist poet” and a “former
teacher of Orbán’s,” hired him to start a conservative think tank. O’Sullivan
and his wife, Melissa, have lived in Budapest ever since. “You really must
meet Melissa,” he told me. “She’s an American—a proper American, from
Alabama.” A friend of the couple’s told me, “Melissa is much more
naturally Trumpy, in terms of her sympathies. John gets the Trump
phenomenon intellectually, but he finds Trump too fickle and sort of gross.”
Orbán—a family man and an articulate lawyer who purports to set aside one
workday a week exclusively for reading—is more to O’Sullivan’s taste.

His think tank is called the Danube Institute. It is funded entirely by a

foundation that is funded entirely by the Hungarian government. This
foundation sponsors international conferences and three handsomely
designed periodicals, all in English: European Conservative, Hungarian
Review, and Hungarian Conservative. In 2015, O’Sullivan, dismayed by the
anti-Orbán consensus among Western journalists and academics (“They all
seem to be making the case for the prosecution, don’t they?”), put together
an essay collection of his own in which he wrote that “the death of liberal
democracy in Hungary has been greatly exaggerated.” After all, O’Sullivan
and other apologists often argue, Orbán has a popular mandate. Rather than
delegating gay rights, the handling of asylum claims, and other matters of
domestic policy to international bodies—with their adherence to such
abstractions as “the rule of law”—isn’t it arguably more democratic to
simply put them to a vote?

Even as the Hungarian constitution has been dismantled, O’Sullivan,

Pangloss of the post-Soviet bloc, has continued to insist that Orbán is still
basically a liberal democrat, if you squint. The problem with this sanguine
view is that it has been repeatedly refuted, even by Orbán. “The new state
that we are building in Hungary is an illiberal state,” he declared in 2014.
O’Sullivan told me that, as soon as he heard this, “the first thing I said to
myself was ‘I’m sure that isn’t really what he meant.’ A few weeks later,
when I saw him for lunch at the Prime Minister’s office, I told him straight
out, ‘You’re going to regret saying that.’ And, actually, I don’t know that he
has.” At times, Orbán seems to mean “illiberal” in the partisan sense, as in
owning the libs; often, he seems to mean it more sweepingly, expressing
skepticism about a wide range of individual liberties. It’s true, as the
Orbánists like to point out, that Hungary is not the most repressive country
in the world. China, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea—all are, by many
measures, less free. But then there are no major political factions trying to
make the United States more like North Korea.

During his first few years in Budapest, O’Sullivan had trouble generating
interest in the Hungarian model of conservatism. “I went wherever I could—
the Anglosphere Society, in New York, Grover Norquist’s Wednesday Club,
in Washington,” he said. “The usual response was a yawn, basically. Until
Brexit, and then Trump—and then, suddenly, people were open to radically
different ideas.” In 2020, the Danube Institute started hosting fellows—
writers and scholars from abroad who were invited to Budapest for a few
weeks or months, given a stipend and a comfortable apartment, and asked to
work on articles or books that might help the cause. “We couldn’t predict
exactly what would come of it,” O’Sullivan said. “You just put the billiard
balls on the table, you know, and wait to see where they end up.”

The most dynamic billiard ball turned out to be Rod Dreher, a prolific
American author who became a Danube Institute fellow in 2021. Dreher has
long been a conservative and a Christian, but, within those traditions, he has
experienced a number of mini-conversions. In a 2006 book, “Crunchy
Cons,” Dreher, then a kind of hipster exile from the Deep South, posited that
conservatives ought to wear some of their cultural markers more lightly—
that Republicans can shop at farmers’ markets, too. In “The Benedict
Option,” in 2017, he argued that conservative Christians had already lost so
many decisive political battles (same-sex marriage, abortion) that they
should arrange a “strategic withdrawal” from the public sphere, building
localist communities rather than contesting for national power. After his
Danube Institute fellowship, though, he retreated from his retreatism:
actually, conservatives could win real power, and Hungary could show the
way. “Orbán was so unafraid, so unapologetic about using his political
power to push back on the liberal élites in business and media and culture,”
Dreher told me. “It was so inspiring: this is what a vigorous conservative
government can do if it’s serious about stemming this horrible global tide of
wokeness.” By the time Orbán ran for reëlection earlier this year, Dreher had
completed his transition from aspiring ascetic to partisan booster. “Mood
here at Fidesz HQ is increasingly cheerful,” he tweeted on Election Night.
“ ‘Lights out, libs!’ say Hungarian voters.”

One April day in 2021, while Dreher was strolling through Budapest, he
texted Tucker Carlson. “We text all the time, whenever I see something he
might want to mention on his show, or just something he might find
interesting,” Dreher told me. Carlson knew what the Western media said
about Orbán, but Dreher encouraged him to ignore it and come see for
himself. “If somebody has all the right enemies, if the liberal establishment
is obsessed with treating them as a hate object, then it’s natural for a right-
populist like me or Tucker to react by going, Huh, maybe there’s something
interesting there,” Dreher said. Carlson told Dreher that he had already
thought about visiting, but that he’d been encountering some bureaucratic
hurdles with the Hungarian Embassy. A few days later, Dreher met Balázs
Orbán—not related to Viktor, but one of his closest advisers. (Many
Hungarians I spoke to described him as a sort of Karl Rove figure.) “I tried
to convince Balázs that Tucker was somebody who could be trusted,”
Dreher recalled. He offered personal assurances that, on the big questions,
Tucker and Orbán were in alignment. By the summer, the red tape had
cleared. (Carlson declined to comment.)

On August 5th, Carlson anchored his show from a rooftop in central

Budapest. Behind his left shoulder was an ornate stone façade, bathed in
sunlight, and, beyond it, a bank of looming storm clouds. “Good evening
and welcome to ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight,’ ” he said. “Of the nearly two
hundred different countries on the face of the earth, precisely one of them
has an elected leader who publicly identifies as a Western-style conservative.
His name is Viktor Orbán.” Carlson was spending the week in Budapest,
delivering each day’s American headline news in his selectively apoplectic
style. “Representative democracy—it’s been our system for nearly two
hundred and fifty years,” he said in one night’s lead segment. “Apparently,
it’s now over.” The ostensible cause of the death of American democracy
was a temporary eviction moratorium enacted by the Centers for Disease
Control. The next night, Carlson aired an obsequious one-on-one interview
with Orbán—fifteen minutes without a single challenging question, and
certainly no warnings about the potential death of Hungarian democracy.

Carlson’s work vacation got a lot of press. Dreher defended him (“Tucker in
Budapest: Blowing People’s Minds”); Andrew Sullivan lambasted him
(“The Price of Tucker Carlson’s Soul: Going Cheap for a Corrupt, Fashy
Kleptocrat”). Online sleuths followed the money. The Hungarian Embassy
in Washington has had contracts with Connie Mack IV, a Republican former
representative from Florida, and David Reaboi, a bodybuilder and former
Andrew Breitbart protégé who touts his skills in “national security &
political warfare.” In 2019, the Embassy paid two hundred and thirteen
thousand dollars to Policy Impact Communications, a D.C.-based P.R. firm
staffed by well-connected lobbyists. One of its board members is Dick
Carlson—the director of the Voice of America under Ronald Reagan, the
Ambassador to the Seychelles under George H. W. Bush, and, as it happens,
Tucker’s father.

By the standards of sponsored diplomacy, though, a six-figure contract is

hardly unusual. (In 2018, the government of Saudi Arabia paid American
lobbyists more than thirty-eight million dollars.) Normally, six figures might
buy you a full-page ad in the Financial Times, say, or help your ambassador
secure a speaking slot at an obscure thought-leader conference; it’s
presumably not enough to get your head of state a long softball interview on
one of the most popular shows on American TV. The payments surely don’t
hurt, but it seems that Carlson, Dreher, and O’Sullivan are true believers,
exuding the contrarian thrill of forbidden knowledge. When I was in
Budapest, Dreher, seven time zones away and in the midst of a messy
divorce, texted me assiduously, including before 5 A.M. his time, trying to
steer my story. “I really do care about Hungary, and I want to help you do a
good job,” he wrote. “God knows it’s not paradise, but it’s important to
understand Hungary as it is.” That’s the sort of P.R. that money can’t buy.

In some ways, Orbán conducts himself like any other strongman. He built a
big soccer stadium in his small home town, and he loves to go there to watch
the games. In the mid-two-thousands, Lőrinc Mészáros, one of Orbán’s
childhood friends, was a pipe fitter receiving welfare checks; shortly after
Orbán returned to power, in 2010, Mészáros became the richest person in
Hungary. This year, when Márki-Zay ran as the opposition candidate, he was
given five minutes on TV to make his case to the voters, and the rest of the
allotted time went to Orbán.

But, unlike Putin-style autocrats, Orbán is often keen to maintain plausible

deniability. “He’ll use such obscure methods that it might take months to
figure out what he’s done,” Scheppele, the Princeton professor, told me. In
2010, Orbán established a relatively small antiterror police unit. Bit by bit,
in disparate clauses buried in unrelated laws, he increased its budget and
removed checks on its power. “I was reading Article 61 of a bill on public
waterworks, literally, and I came across a line that said, Oh, by the way, the
antiterror unit now gets to collect personal information on all water-utility
customers, which basically means everyone in the country, without notifying
them,” Scheppele went on. She contends that the unit now functions,
essentially, as Orbán’s secret police. “His claim is always ‘Everything I’m
doing is legal’—well, of course it is, because you made it legal,” she said.
The goal, as the scholar John Keane puts it in his book “The New
Despotism,” is a kind of bureaucratic gaslighting: the ability to insist that
what everyone knows is happening is not in fact happening.

Cartoon by Roz Chast

I was experiencing a tiny microcosm of this while trying to register for

CPAC Hungary. I had sent an e-mail, as instructed—then another, then
another. Each time, I encountered a new bureaucratic hurdle: wait a week,
call this phone number, try this link. The organizers maintained that the
event would be open to the press. “We are fighting for everyone’s right to
speak,” Balázs Orbán, who was scheduled to appear at the conference, said
in a radio interview. A few days later, I met him at a café where jaunty, self-
help-y aphorisms had been written on each table in sidewalk chalk. (“Take
others’ opinions lightly—very lightly,” our table read.) I asked him about the
government’s suppression of same-sex marriage and gay adoption. “If the
state is pushing for the policy where the marriage is only between a man and
a woman, and seventy per cent of the people want this, it’s not tyranny of the
majority,” he said. The popularity is beside the point, I argued, if the policy
is a violation of human rights. “According to my understanding, it’s not,” he
said. When our conversation was done, he asked me to pose with him for a
photo. I mentioned that I was having trouble getting into CPAC and asked if
he would put in a good word with the organizers. His response, which I had
to admit was quite clever, was that, as a government official, it would be
improper for him to intervene.

Dreher assured me that there must be some innocent mixup. When I met
O’Sullivan at his office, he agreed: “I’m sure it’s merely an oversight.” I told
him that I had been in touch with journalists from the Guardian, Rolling
Stone, Vice, and a range of independent Hungarian publications, none of
whom had heard back from the CPAC organizers. A few hours later, all our
requests were formally denied, and Vice published a piece titled “CPAC Just
Decided to Not Let Any US Journalists Inside.” In the American context,
this sort of thing—for example, the Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate
Doug Mastriano banning press from a campaign rally—is still rare enough
to raise eyebrows. In Hungary, it has become so commonplace that some
reporters didn’t even bother applying to CPAC. “They’ll be very polite, and
then at the last minute they’ll tell you, ‘We’re so sorry, space constraints,’ ”
another journalist told me. (When I sent an e-mail to the government’s
International Communications Office, asking to fact-check the relevant
claims in this piece, the official response read, in part, “We appreciate the
possibility you offered us, however, we do not wish to participate in the
validation process of leftist-liberal propaganda.”)

When I was about to leave O’Sullivan’s office, he asked whether he would

see me again that night, at the CPAC welcome reception. At this point, I
couldn’t tell whether I was being elaborately trolled. “I didn’t get an
invitation, but I’d love to go if I can,” I said. “Where will it be?”

One of his staffers helpfully piped up: “Some hotel near the Elisabeth
Bridge. The Paris something or other?”

On my way out, Googling frantically on my phone, I found a five-star hotel

fitting this description: the Párizsi Udvar. I went back to my room (in a
perfectly nice, decidedly not-five-star hotel) and grabbed a sports coat and a
notebook. A few minutes later, I was standing outside the entrance to the
Párizsi Udvar, not sure what to do next. “Event?” a white-gloved doorman
asked. “Event? Event?” I nodded, and he ushered me inside.

The hotel’s courtyard, a former shopping arcade covered with a vast stained-
glass dome, was one of the most opulent interiors I’ve ever seen. There were
marble columns, floors of intricate Moorish tilework, and glass display cases
stocked with jeroboams of fancy champagne. (In the 2011 film version of
“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” an M.I.6 agent is double-crossed by a
Hungarian general, shot, and captured by Soviet spies. The scene was filmed
in the courtyard of the Párizsi Udvar.) About two hundred people were there,
holding drinks and sampling Hungarian-American-fusion finger food. I ran
into O’Sullivan (“Ah, good, you made it!”) and spotted Rick Santorum, the
former Pennsylvania senator, who was due to appear on a panel with
Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of the Brazilian autocrat (and a scheduled
speaker at the following American Conservative Union conference, CPAC
Brazil). Candace Owens, the YouTube culture warrior and the author of
“Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the
Democrat Plantation,” leaned against the bar, visibly pregnant, as a crush of
admirers lined up to shake her hand. (Her husband, George Farmer, the
C.E.O. of the social network Parler, stood next to her, looking down at his
phone.) I’d heard that, while Owens was in town, Viktor Orbán had
requested a closed-door meeting with her and a few others in his book-lined
office, to discuss culture and politics. Owens later confirmed, in a CPAC
promotional video, that she’d met with Orbán for about two hours: “It was
really amazing. He’s so on it.”

Miklós Szánthó appeared on a dais, holding a microphone, and quieted the

crowd. “Why are we doing this?” he said. “We are doing this to make the
liberals’ nightmare true.” He addressed the Americans in the room: “We do
hope that you can learn from us the political mind-set how to be a successful
conservative, as we also learn from you, and from Ronald Reagan. As he put
it so many years ago, ‘We win, they lose.’ That is what the Hungarian right
has done.”

Dan Schneider, the executive director of the A.C.U., told me that he was
especially excited for CPAC Israel, coming up this July, in Tel Aviv. (I didn’t
know it at the time, but another speaker in Budapest would be an old
political ally of Orbán’s, Zsolt Bayer, a notorious Hungarian talk-show host
who has used racist epithets for Black people, has referred to Roma people
as “animals” who must be “stamped out,” and has argued that the
widespread anti-Semitism in twentieth-century Hungary was
“understandable.”) I also met Mark Krikorian, a severe immigration
restrictionist whose American nonprofit, the Center for Immigration Studies,
has been classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. “I
can’t get a speaking gig at an American CPAC to save my life, but I fly four
thousand miles over here and I’m welcomed with open arms,” Krikorian told
me. I asked him if he was worried about being, as O’Sullivan had put it,
“tarred with the brush of Orbánism.” “What are they gonna do, call me an
ultra-hate group?” Krikorian said. “Fuck them!”

After an hour or so, Schneider pulled me aside. “I haven’t eaten dinner yet,”
he said. “You wanna get out of here?” We strolled aimlessly, eventually
stopping at an upscale bistro in a picturesque square. I ordered the venison
goulash; Schneider picked something called the Hungarian Rhapsody. He
kept his phone next to his water glass, occasionally tapping out a text.
Though he never said so outright, it seemed clear that he had the personal
cell numbers of several Republican senators, perhaps a Supreme Court
Justice or two, and presumably at least one ex- and potentially future
President.

“So what do you make of the Hungary thing, really?” he had asked me
earlier. I tried to answer honestly but also diplomatically. “Clearly,” I began,
“there are issues with the way Orbán wields state power.”

“Wields state power! ” Schneider said, spitting the words back in my face.
“You make it sound so nefarious!” I brought up Hungary’s not entirely
independent judiciary. “Oh, so he appoints judges he likes,” Schneider said,
rolling his eyes. “Is that so different from what we do?” He meant to
normalize Orbán’s behavior, but I couldn’t help interpreting it the other way
around: the brazen opportunism of the Republican Party—for example,
refusing to give a hearing to the opposition’s judicial nominees, then
ramming through its own, in obvious violation of precedent and basic
fairness—did seem undeniably Orbánesque. He called himself “a classical
liberal,” adding, “You can’t secure individual liberty unless you secure
national sovereignty first.” I made the obvious rejoinder that Orbán, for one,
clearly does not consider himself a classical liberal. “Well, maybe I just
haven’t read enough about it,” Schneider said.

At dinner, he was midsentence when a man approached us and, without a

word, grabbed Schneider’s phone from the table and ran off. Before I could
process what was happening, Schneider, a former track athlete, was already
in pursuit. He slipped and fell, then got up and kept running, following the
thief around a corner. By the time I caught up with them, Schneider had
tackled the man and recovered his phone. We walked back to our table. “I
think I broke a rib,” Schneider said. “And I definitely scuffed my shoes,
which were not cheap.” The man followed a few yards behind us, shouting
expletives, at one point even brandishing a brick. Eventually, the police
came and took him away. “I’m so sorry,” our waiter told us, in English,
when we were seated again, catching our breath. “Nothing like that ever
happens here. I am sure that this man was not really a Hungarian.”

There was no single moment when the democratic backsliding began in

Hungary. There were no shots fired, no tanks in the streets. “Orbán doesn’t
need to kill us, he doesn’t need to jail us,” Tibor Dessewffy, a sociology
professor at Eötvös Loránd University, told me. “He just keeps narrowing
the space of public life. It’s what’s happening in your country, too—the frog
isn’t boiling yet, but the water is getting hotter.” He acknowledged that the
U.S. has safeguards that Hungary does not: the two-party system, which
might forestall a slide into perennial single-party rule; the American
Constitution, which is far more difficult to amend. Still, it wasn’t hard for
him to imagine Americans a decade hence being, in some respects, roughly
where the Hungarians are today. “I’m sorry to tell you, I’m your worst
nightmare,” Dessewffy said, with a wry smile. As worst nightmares went, I
had to admit, it didn’t seem so bad at first glance. He was sitting in a placid
garden, enjoying a lemonade, wearing cargo shorts. “This is maybe the
strangest part,” he said. “Even my parents, who lived under Stalin, still
drank lemonade, still went swimming in the lake on a hot day, still fell in
love. In the nightmare scenario, you still have a life, even if you feel
somewhat guilty about it.”

Lee Drutman, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, tweeted last year,

“Anybody serious about commenting on the state of US democracy should
start reading more about Hungary.” In other words, not only can it happen
here but, if you look at certain metrics, it’s already started happening.
Republicans may not be able to rewrite the Constitution, but they can exploit
existing loopholes, replace state election officials with Party loyalists,
submit alternative slates of electors, and pack federal courts with
sympathetic judges. Representation in Hungary has grown less proportional
in recent years, thanks to gerrymandering and other tweaks to the electoral
rules. In April, Fidesz got fifty-four per cent of the vote but won eighty-three
per cent of the districts. “At that level of malapportionment, you’d be hard
pressed to find a good-faith political scientist who would call that country a
true democracy,” Drutman told me. “The trends in the U.S. are going very
quickly in the same direction. It’s completely possible that the Republican
Party could control the House, the Senate, and the White House in 2025,
despite losing the popular vote in every case. Is that a democracy?”

“C’mon, you said you wanted to spice it up.”

Cartoon by Lars Kenseth

In 2018, Steve Bannon, after he was fired from the Trump Administration,
went on a kind of European tour, giving paid talks and meeting with
nationalist allies across the Continent. In May, he stopped in Budapest. One
of his hosts there was the XXI Century Institute, a think tank with close ties
to the Orbán administration. “I can tell, Viktor Orbán triggers ’em like
Trump,” Bannon said onstage, flashing a rare smile. “He was Trump before
Trump.” After his speech, he joined his hosts for a dinner cruise on the
Danube. (The cruise was captured in unreleased footage from the
documentary “The Brink.” Bannon’s spokesperson stopped responding to
requests for comment.) On board, Bannon met Miklós Szánthó, sipping a
beer and watching the sun set, who mentioned that he ran a “conservative,
center-right think tank” that opposed “N.G.O.s financed by the Open Society
network.”
“Oh, my God, Soros!” Bannon said. “You guys beat him up badly here.”
Szánthó accepted the praise with a stoic grin. Bannon went on, “We love to
take lessons from you guys in the U.S.”

In 2018, “Trump before Trump” was the highest compliment that Bannon
could think to pay Orbán. In 2022, many on the American right are trying to
anticipate what a Trump after Trump might look like. Orbán provides one
potential answer. Even Trump’s putative allies will admit, in private, that he
was a lazy, feckless leader. They wanted an Augustus; they got a Caligula. In
theory, Trump was amenable to dismantling the administrative state, to
pushing norms and institutions beyond their breaking points, even to reaping
the benefits of a full autocratic breakthrough. But, instead of laying out long-
term strategies to wrest control of key levers of power, he tweeted, and
watched TV, and whined on the phone about how his tin-pot insurrection
schemes weren’t coming to fruition. What would happen if the Republican
Party were led by an American Orbán, someone with the patience to
envision a semi-authoritarian future and the diligence and the ruthlessness to
achieve it?

In 2018, Patrick Deneen’s book “Why Liberalism Failed” was admired by

David Brooks and Barack Obama. Last year, Deneen founded a hard-right
Substack called the Postliberal Order, on which he argued that right-wing
populists had not gone nearly far enough—that American conservatism
should abandon its “defensive crouch.” One of his co-authors wrote a post
from Budapest, offering an example of how this could work in practice: “It’s
clear that Hungarian conservatism is not defensive.” J. D. Vance has voiced
admiration for Orbán’s pro-natalist family policies, adding, “Why can’t we
do that here?” Rod Dreher told me, “Seeing what Vance is saying, and what
Ron DeSantis is actually doing in Florida, the concept of American
Orbánism starts to make sense. I don’t want to overstate what they’ll be able
to accomplish, given the constitutional impediments and all, but DeSantis is
already using the power of the state to push back against woke capitalism,
against the crazy gender stuff.” According to Dreher, what the Republican
Party needs is “a leader with Orbán’s vision—someone who can build on
what Trumpism accomplished, without the egomania and the inattention to
policy, and who is not afraid to step on the liberals’ toes.”
In common parlance, the opposite of “liberal” is “conservative.” In political-
science terms, illiberalism means something more radical: a challenge to the
very rules of the game. There are many valid critiques of liberalism, from
the left and the right, but Orbán’s admirers have trouble articulating how
they could install a post-liberal American state without breaking a few eggs
(civil rights, fair elections, possibly the democratic experiment itself). “The
central insight of twentieth-century conservatism is that you work within the
liberal order—limited government, free movement of capital, all of that—
even when it’s frustrating,” Andrew Sullivan said.“If you just give away the
game and try to seize as much power as possible, then what you’re doing is
no longer conservative, and, in my view, you’re making a grave, historic
mistake.” Lauren Stokes, the Northwestern historian, is a leftist with her
own radical critiques of liberalism; nonetheless, she, too, thinks that the
right-wing post-liberals are playing with fire. “By hitching themselves to
someone who has put himself forward as a post-liberal intellectual, I think
American conservatives are starting to give themselves permission to
discard liberal norms,” Stokes told me. “When a Hungarian court does
something Orbán doesn’t like—something too pro-queer, too pro-immigrant
—he can just say, ‘This court is an enemy of the people, I don’t have to
listen to it.’ I think Republicans are setting themselves up to adopt a similar
logic: if the system gives me a result I don’t like, I don’t have to abide by it.”

On the morning after the reception, I arrived at the building where CPAC
Hungary was being held—a glass-covered, humpbacked protuberance
known as the Whale. Orbán was due to speak in thirty minutes. I walked up
to an outdoor media-registration desk, where a Center for Fundamental
Rights employee named Dóra confirmed that I would not be allowed to
enter. “I have to get back to work now,” she said, although there was no one
else in line. She called over a security guard, who stood in front of me,
blocking my view of the entrance, and demanded that I go “outside.” I made
the argument that we were already outside. Within five minutes, he was
threatening to call the police. (The Center for Fundamental Rights later
declined to comment on specific claims in this piece, writing,
“Unfortunately there is a lot of fake news in the article.”)

I texted Rod Dreher, who seemed to think that his allies were making a
tactical mistake: surely, antagonizing journalists would make the coverage
worse. He and Melissa O’Sullivan scrambled to find attendees willing to pop
out between sessions and talk to me. I spoke with a friend of Dreher’s, an
urbane descendant of Hungarian aristocrats and a study in cultivated
neutrality: “I am a businessperson, so I believe in the win-win-win, which
means that no one is on the wrong side, ever, you see? No one is the Devil,
even the Devil.” Later, I talked to another friend of Dreher’s, who, after
chatting for a few minutes, said, “I’ve got one of these badges. Why don’t
you put it on, try to walk in, and see what happens?”

It was calmer than I’d expected inside the Whale. CPAC Orlando had been a
manic circus of lib-triggering commotion; CPAC Hungary was less flashy,
more focussed. Young volunteers wearing business suits passed out policy
papers printed on thick stock. “He’s made it in again!” John O’Sullivan said,
smiling and clapping me on the shoulder. Schneider, who had spent much of
our dinner disclaiming the most wild-eyed, conspiratorial members of his
coalition, was now chatting with Jack Posobiec, who has made a career out
of promoting election disinformation, child-groomer memes, and other bits
of corrosive propaganda.

The speaker onstage was Gavin Wax, the twenty-seven-year-old president of

the New York Young Republican Club. (For most of the twentieth century,
the club endorsed liberal Republicans, but, after an internal coup in 2019, it
endorsed both Trump and Orbán for reëlection.) There were about a hundred
people in the audience, most of them listening to Wax through live
translation on clunky plastic headsets. “Hungary has frequently become a
target because it is a shining example of how easily the globalist agenda can
be repelled,” Wax said. “We demand nothing short of an American
Orbánism. We accept nothing less than total victory!” From the outside, the
Whale had looked vast, airy, translucent. Inside the main hall, there were
various camera setups and artificial-lighting rigs but not a crack of sunlight.

Tucker Carlson recorded a message from his home studio in Maine. “I can’t
believe you’re in Budapest and I am not,” he said. “You know why you can
tell it’s a wonderful country? Because the people who have turned our
country into a much less good place are hysterical when you point it out.”
Trump also sent a greeting by video: “Viktor Orbán, he’s a great leader, a
great gentleman, and he just had a very big election result. I was very
honored to have endorsed him. A little unusual endorsement, usually I’m
looking at the fifty states, but here we went a little bit astray.” During his
keynote address, Orbán said, “President Trump has undeniable merits, but
nevertheless he was not reëlected in 2020.” Fidesz, by contrast, “did not
resign ourselves to our minority status. We played to win.”

In 2002, when Orbán lost his first reëlection campaign, he left office, but
neither he nor his followers ever really accepted the result. “The homeland
cannot be in opposition,” he said—in other words, he was still the legitimate
representative of the Hungarian people, and no election result could change
that. Trump, of course, has been perseverating on a similar theme for the
past year and a half, and he, too, has a cultural movement, a media
ecosystem, and a political party that will echo it. At CPAC Orlando, most of
the speakers ritually invoked the shibboleth that Trump had actually won the
2020 election, despite all evidence. Several attendees told me that, if the
Republicans had any backbone, they would win back the House in 2022,
amass as much power as possible at the state level, and then do whatever it
took to deliver the Presidency back to the Party in 2024. A free but not fair
election, captured partisan courts, the institutions of democracy limping
along in hollowed-out form—these seemed like telltale signs of early-stage
Goulash Authoritarianism. Now here the Americans were, studying at
Orbán’s knee.

Trump may run in 2024, and he may win, fairly or unfairly. What worried
me most, sitting in the belly of the Whale, was not the person of Donald
Trump but a Republican Party that resembled Orbán’s party, Fidesz, more by
the month—increasingly comfortable with naked power grabs, with treating
all political opposition as fundamentally illegitimate, with assuming that any
checks on its dominance were mere inconveniences to be bypassed by any
quasi-legalistic means. “There are many things that the Americans here want
to learn from the Hungarians,” Balázs Orbán had told me. “We’re going to
keep our heritage for ourselves, our Christian heritage, our ethnic heritage
. . . that’s what I think they want to say but they can’t say, and so they point
to someone who can say it. If they want us to play that role, we are fine with
that.” After I got back to the U.S., I spoke to Dreher, who mentioned that he
was thinking about moving from Louisiana to Budapest, where he had been
offered a job with the Danube Institute. “I really like the Hungarian people,
and I think it could be useful to build a network of Christians and
intellectuals who are thinking about the future,” he said. “We in the West
still have so much to learn.” ♦
Musical Events

Anything Goes at the Ojai Festival

By Alex Ross

Audiences at the Ojai Music Festival, the Southern California new-music

jamboree, are accustomed to unpredictable goings on, but this year’s edition
may have caught even veteran attendees off guard. A percussionist ran in
circles, banging tubular bells; a cellist played his instrument while sitting on
a skateboard in motion; another cellist entered a performance venue with a
wardrobe slung over his back; dancers in inflatable triceratops costumes
waltzed in the town park. The festival culminated in a gloriously raucous
rendition of Julius Eastman’s “Stay on It,” with dancers streaming off the
stage and into the audience.

The Ojai festival, which has been rattling an idyllic mountain valley for
seventy-five years, has a different music director each season. This time, the
job fell to the American Modern Opera Company (amoc), a youthful
collective of seventeen singers, instrumentalists, and dancers founded five
years ago by the composer Matthew Aucoin and the stage director Zack
Winokur. Some members of the group have already found fame in the
classical-music industry: Aucoin’s opera “Eurydice” was staged this past
season at the Met, and amoc’s resident singers—Paul Appleby, Julia
Bullock, Anthony Roth Costanzo, and Davóne Tines—all have international
careers. Yet amoc, which is based at a commune-like complex in southern
Vermont, allows more freedom than larger institutions can readily
accommodate. Rigid hierarchies are replaced by a more democratic,
borderline-anarchic practice. Specialization breaks down: dancers sing,
singers dance, instrumentalists do both.

Democracy can be a messy process, and not all of amoc’s concoctions jelled.
There was a minor surfeit of precocious nuttiness; more than once, I felt as if
I were watching a brainstorming session for a future piece rather than the
piece itself. But the let’s-just-try-it spirit delivered more than a few jolts of
insight. Tines, in a program note describing amoc’s approach to Eastman’s
unswervingly radical music, wrote, “What is possible if all members of a
performing ensemble are present for every step of the creation of a
performance?” Ojai made the possibilities clear.

Although amoc has “opera” in its name, it spurns conventional definitions of

the genre. Anyone expecting eventful plots, well-defined characters, or
elaborate sets would have come away from Ojai disappointed. In another
sense, though, amoc’s presentations are truer to the roots of opera than most
modern manifestations of the form. The courtly masques of Renaissance
Italy, from which opera arose, placed music, dance, and poetry on equal
terms, with a playful spirit predominating; the idea of a composer
masterminding a coherent drama came later.

The emphasis on dance and movement gives amoc an especially original

stamp. Its four dancer-choreographers—Bobbi Jene Smith, Or Schraiber,
Julia Eichten, and Winokur, who studied dance at Juilliard—help to shape
works from the start. Smith and Schraiber, who are married, met as members
of the Batsheva Dance Company, in Tel Aviv, where they absorbed the
“gaga” practice of the renegade Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin—a
liquid, loose-limbed, ever-gyrating form of movement that can be adopted
by people who aren’t trained dancers.

Enter the brilliant young cellist Coleman Itzkoff, carrying a wardrobe on his
back. In Schraiber’s piece “The Cello Player,” Itzkoff played the role of a
troubadour who brings his music from place to place—a clutch of laments,
by Giovanni Sollima, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, and György Ligeti. After
retrieving his cello from the wardrobe, he interacts with a pair of dancers,
Schraiber and Yiannis Logothetis, who seem to be isolated souls—perhaps
brothers, perhaps friends—locked in an eternal coexistence. The duo
alternates between listless poses and precise bursts of synchronized
movement: folkish prancing, slapstick pratfalls, belligerent lunges and
swipes, moments of sensual embrace that slip away. It’s a study in the
complexities of male bonding, with the music suggesting a ritual that plays
out time and again.

Related in spirit was a larger-scale work, “Open Rehearsal,” which Smith

conceived and directed, in collaboration with a dozen musicians and
dancers. The piece grew from a pandemic-era project, titled “Broken
Theater,” that imagines a group of artists confronting existential questions
when their audience disappears. In Ojai, musicians again stepped out of
supporting roles and into the melee. The violinist Keir GoGwilt sauntered
about playing Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor while tensions among the artists
built to a moment of violence. At the end, the dancer Vinson Fraley sang a
piercingly gorgeous rendition of Pete Seeger’s “One Grain of Sand,” which
had the effect of an otherworldly consolation.
The sense of a return to operatic origins was heightened by the participation
of the early-music ensemble Ruckus, whose founder, the bassoonist Clay
Zeller-Townson, is married to Aucoin. At a riveting afternoon concert in the
Libbey Bowl, the festival’s chief venue, Ruckus added improvisatory
flourishes and jaunty dance rhythms to an array of pieces by Bach, with the
flutist Emi Ferguson virtuosically carrying the upper lines. At another
concert, Ferguson joined the pianist Conor Hanick to première two
movements from Michael Hersch’s evening-length flute-and-piano cycle
“scars plummet to the earth”—music of introverted intensity that promises
to yield a large-scale amoc work in the future.

Compositional styles ran a wide gamut at the festival, from the ethereal
simplicity of Cassandra Miller’s “About Bach” to the riotous, pop-flavored
eclecticism of Doug Balliett’s mini-opera “Rome Is Falling.” Aucoin
contributed a new chamber-orchestra song cycle entitled “Family Dinner.”
This greatly gifted but still developing composer did best when he shook off
influences from older colleagues (John Adams, Thomas Adès) and found his
own agile, spiky rhythm. The highlight of “Family Dinner” was a
quicksilver setting of Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You”; Appleby
fired off the text as if it were avant-garde Gilbert and Sullivan.

One crucial member of amoc missed the Ojai festivities: Bullock withdrew
after testing positive for covid. She was to have sung in Winokur’s staging of
Olivier Messiaen’s kaleidoscopic song cycle “Harawi”; no one could assume
her role on short notice, though the soprano Ariadne Greif adroitly took up
some of Bullock’s other festival assignments. The flexibility of the amoc
apparatus enabled a quick substitution for “Harawi.” Tines, already
scheduled to perform an all-Eastman program, added on his well-travelled
conceptual recital “mass,” which ranges from Bach to gospel.

These appearances provided fresh evidence that Tines, recently the star of
Anthony Davis’s “X,” at Detroit Opera, is one of the most spellbinding
singers before the public today. In the Eastman sequence, he displayed
visceral force and ironic intelligence in equal measure; in a rendition of
Frederic Rzewski’s minimalist classic “Coming Together,” he applied a
welter of nuances to the spoken text (a letter from the Attica prison inmate
Sam Melville). And in “BALM,” his and Aucoin’s elaboration of the spiritual
“There Is a Balm in Gilead,” Tines broke Ojai’s relaxed mood by recounting
a racist slight that he had endured the previous night. In the town park, he
reported, a woman had said to him, “I don’t like anything about you, but I
love your voice.”

Ojai fancies itself a progressive place, even if in recent years it has become a
playground for the Los Angeles élite. There were grumblings afterward: Did
the incident require such a pointed response? Yet Tines was right to speak
out, particularly given the awesome dexterity with which he did so. Instead
of stopping to tell the dismal story, he sang it, improvising vocal lines as the
amoc ensemble vamped behind him. Whatever discomfort he engendered
had ebbed away by festival’s end, when white-haired spectators were
shouting “Stay on it!” and dancing in their seats. Sometimes, politicizing art
makes it more beautiful and true. ♦
Onward and Upward with the Arts

The Weird, Analog Delights of Foley Sound Effects

By Anna Wiener

Content

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

The salvage yard at M. Maselli & Sons, in Petaluma, California, is made up

of six acres of angle irons, block pulleys, doorplates, digging tools, motors,
fencing, tubing, reels, spools, and rusted machinery. To the untrained eye,
the place is a testament to the enduring power of American detritus, but to
Foley artists—craftspeople who create custom sound effects for film,
television, and video games—it’s a trove of potential props. On a recent
morning, Shelley Roden and John Roesch, Foley artists who work at
Skywalker Sound, the postproduction audio division of Lucasfilm, stood in
the parking lot, considering the sonic properties of an enormous industrial
hopper. “I’m looking for a resonator, and I need more ka-chunkers,” Roden,
who is blond and in her late forties, said. A lazy Susan was also on the
checklist—something to produce a smooth, swivelling sound. Roesch, a
puffer-clad sexagenarian with white hair, had brought his truck, in the event
of a large haul. The pair was joined by Scott Curtis, their Foley mixer, a
bearded fiftysomething. Curtis was in the market for a squeaky hinge.
“There was a door at the Paramount stage that had the best creak,” he said.
“The funny thing was, the cleaning crew discovered this hinge squeak, and
they lubricated the squeak—the hinge. It was never the same.”

Petaluma is a historically agricultural town, and that afternoon was the

thirty-ninth annual Butter and Egg Days Parade; the air smelled of lavender
and barbecued meat. Inside the yard, Curtis immediately gravitated toward a
pile of what looked like millstones, or sanding wheels. He began rotating
one against another, producing a gritty, high-pitched ring, like an
elementary-school fire alarm. “The texture is great,” Roden said. She
suggested that one of the wheels could be used as a sweetener—a sound that
is subtly layered over another sound, to add dimension—for a high-tech roll-
up door, or perhaps one made of stone. “It’s kinda chimey,” she said,
wavering. “It has potential.” A few yards away, Curtis had moved on to a
shelf of metal filing-cabinet drawers, freckled with rust. “We have so many
metal boxes,” Roden said, and walked away.

“It’s kinda the squeak I was looking for,” Curtis said softly.
“Hey, guys, remember the ‘Black Panther’ area?” Roden called out. “Wanna
explore?” She led the group past a rack of hanging chains, also rusted; Curtis
lightly palmed a few in sequence, producing the pleasant rings of a
tintinnabulum. Roden pointed to the spot where she had found a curved
crowbar to create the sound of Vibranium—a fictional rare metal unique to
the Marvel universe—before zeroing in on a rack of thimbles, clamps, nuts,
bolts, and washers. The trio began knocking and tapping hardware together,
producing a series of chimes, tinks, and clunks. Roesch, who calls himself
an “audile”—someone who processes information in a primarily auditory
manner, rather than in a visual or a material one—had unearthed a sceptre-
like industrial tool with a moving part, and was rapidly sliding it back and
forth. “Robot,” he said.

The bulk of the sound in film is typically added in postproduction. “I always

say there’s sound effects, like footsteps, and then there’s music,” the director
David Lynch, whose films are famous for their inventive, evocative sound
design, said. “And then there’s sound effects that are like music. . . . They
conjure a feeling.” Traditionally, “hard effects” cover ambient noises such as
traffic or rain, or the more mechanical, combustive sounds of explosions and
gunfire; they are usually pulled from libraries, or electronically produced.
Foley effects are custom to a film, and are synchronized to characters’
movements. They might include the sound of someone walking across a
room, rolling over in bed, stirring a pot, typing, fighting, dancing, eating,
falling, or kissing. The line between the two kinds of effect is thin: Foley
artists record the sound of a hand twisting a doorknob, but not the sound of
the mechanism turning within. Foley is subtle but suggestive, capturing
offstage bedsprings, or the shuffle of a clumsy intruder. In the past hundred
years, technology has changed the process of recording, editing, and
engineering sounds, but the techniques of Foley have remained stubbornly
analog. Behind any given Foley effect, no matter how complex, are one or
two people contorting their bodies in a soundproof room.
Foley artists have historically worked in pairs. (Certain sounds are so
complex that they require the labor of four hands.) Roden and Roesch are
two of the masters in their field. David Fincher, the director of movies
including “The Social Network,” “Gone Girl,” and “Mank,” told me that
Foley is “a very strange calling,” and “a dark art” foundational to
filmmaking. “You’re trying to make beautiful sounds that make their point
once and get the hell out of Dodge,” Fincher said. “The people who do it
really, really well are few and far between.”

The group continued walking through the salvage yard, clanking poles
together, pushing buttons, tapping metal surfaces, flapping doors, turning
cranks. Roesch pulled a handle on the front of an electrical cabinet, and it
made a satisfying fnnp. “Those are sha-shonkers, for sure,” Roden said
approvingly. She flipped a large metal clasp back and forth. “It’s lovely.”
The group headed to a rack of hinges. Roden tested one; it made a seesawing
squeal. She retrieved another and flapped it back and forth. “Screaming
puppy,” she said, shaking her head. She looked up at me. “Did you lose a
filling?”

For an audile, the yard seemed like a potentially overstimulating

environment. I imagined the old mattress springs and racks of hardware
bursting to life, “Fantasia”-like, jangling and clunking in a private
cacophony. I relayed this to Roden, who shook her head. “No, no, no, not at
all—it’s potential creativity,” she said. “You know what’s overstimulating?
Sitting in a movie theatre.”

Sound effects emerged in the late nineteenth century, as the motion-picture

industry experimented with accompaniment to silent films. Theatres brought
in live bands, orchestras, lecturers, and hidden actors who stomped and
clattered in conjunction with movies; they tested strategically placed
phonographs and the Kinetophone, a contraption introduced by Thomas
Edison, which attempted to synch sound to movement. Enterprising
inventors created effects “traps,” small machines meant to imitate everyday
sounds such as a baby crying or a nose being blown. In a recent paper for the
academic journal Film History, Stephen Bottomore, a historian of early
cinema, cited a 1911 article that griped about the maximalism such devices
facilitated: “It is often the case that a youth with no imagination, and with
very limited brain power, combined with a spirit of mischief, ‘lets himself
go,’ when presiding over the sound machine.”

In 1926, Warner Bros., then a small outfit best known for a movie about a
German shepherd named Rin Tin Tin, débuted the Vitaphone, which allowed
for synchronized recorded sound. That year, the studio released “Don Juan,”
a silent film with a recorded musical score and a handful of sound effects:
tepid clicks to accompany swords in combat; clangs and chimes to add
weight to wedding bells. Initially, it was impractical for production teams to
edit recordings, and dialogue, music, and sound effects had to be recorded in
real time, on set. “In a lot of cases, those recordings were still the sounds
that musicians used to perform in the theatres,” Emily Thompson, a historian
of technology at Princeton, told me. “You’ll hear drummers instead of
machine guns, or saxophones when ducks go by onscreen.”

Foley takes its name from Jack Foley, a stuntman, prop handler, and
assistant director at Universal Pictures in the late twenties. His breakout was
“Show Boat,” which was initially intended to be a silent film; facing
competition from Warner Bros., Universal added a soundtrack, which
included dialogue, during postproduction. Jack Foley provided sound
effects: handclaps, footsteps. He built a small crew, and their workspace
became known as “Foley’s room”; other studios eventually developed their
own “Foley stages.” Later, a technique known as sound-on-film—in which
recorded sound is converted to light waves printed directly onto film strips
—made it possible to work with effects separately, something that allowed
for more artistic freedom. In the thirties, sound technicians sought “wild”
recordings—a literalism that prioritized the grinding rush of an actual train
over the smoother, more controllable sound of roller skates cruising over a
wood floor. But some directors used sound effects for their suggestive
qualities, such as the growing thunder of encroaching shells in “A Farewell
to Arms,” or the sinister whistling of the serial killer Hans Beckert in Fritz
Lang’s “M.”

In the decades that followed, sound work continued to evolve, both

technologically and aesthetically. Studios assembled robust catalogues of
sound effects. (Certain stock sound effects became famous, such as the
“Wilhelm scream,” which was reproduced in dozens of movies.) Multitrack
recording enabled effects artists to create more complex soundscapes. But it
wasn’t until the mid-seventies, with the innovation of Dolby Stereo—a
sound system with four channels, rather than the usual two—that filmmakers
began to truly embrace the possibilities of stereo sound.

Roesch studied film at N.Y.U. and at the American Film Institute, and
entered the industry in 1978. Soon after he moved to Los Angeles, Joan
Rowe, who collected rent for Roesch’s landlord, and who was freelancing as
a Foley artist, brought Roesch into the studio where she worked. “He was
absolutely amazing,” she told me. “There was a character that came running
across the stage, and jumped up, and spun around, and flipped over—I just
can’t tell you the number of intricate steps that this character had—and John
just went loobaloobaloobaloo.” She made a kind of cartoonish spiral sound
to imitate his movements.
Roesch and Rowe became Foley partners. One of their first projects together
was “The Black Stallion,” from 1979. (To simulate the clatter of horses’
hooves, they stuffed toilet plungers with fabric, among other techniques.)
Roesch worked on the footsteps for Michael Jackson’s dance moves in
“Thriller.” He and Rowe were hired by Steven Spielberg to do the Foley for
“E.T.” That film, Rowe told me, was “the Foley artist’s dream, the Foley
artist’s joy.” Spielberg had a distinct idea of how he wanted E.T. to sound:
liquidy and alien, but funny, and not scary. Most crucially, it was important
that the wide-eyed, wrinkled, freaky extraterrestrial be lovable. To make the
sounds of E.T.’s movements, Rowe and Roesch landed on raw liver, which
slid about in its package, and jello wrapped in a damp T-shirt. For the
character’s body falls, Rowe recalls using a novelty-sized bag of popcorn;
Roesch remembers using a pillowcase filled with rice and cereal.

There are certain well-worn tricks of the trade. Vegetables are old standbys:
snapped celery for broken bones, hammered cabbage for a punch.
(According to the Web site Atlas Obscura, during the climax of “Titanic,” in
which Kate Winslet floats, shivering, on a piece of debris, Foley artists
peeled back layers of frozen lettuce to add texture to the sound of her
crisping hair.) Paper clips or nails, taped to the tips of a glove, are useful for
the clicking footsteps of a house pet. Wet pieces of chamois leather, the sort
that is used for cleaning cars, are highly versatile. “They sound just like
mud,” Rowe said. “Also, they’re excellent for blood. If you want to stab
somebody in the chest, and you want to hear the sound of the knife going
in”—here she made a gushing, kuschhy sound—“get that chamois out and
just squish it. I found this big plastic cup, and when you put a chamois in it,
when it’s wet, when you rub it up and down”—she emitted another guttural
gush—“it makes this incredible sound.”

Roesch refers to the eighties as his Camelot. He was part of the Foley team
on “The Empire Strikes Back”—a large trash can for R2-D2—and worked
on hits such as “Tron,” “Lethal Weapon,” “Gremlins,” and “Sixteen
Candles.” The director John Hughes’s films, Roesch recalled, were
straightforward, with the exception of the leather jackets in “The Breakfast
Club”: “The one thing is, when you have leather jackets, are they just leather
jackets, or are they evil, are they over the top—are we going to be concerned
about this character?” For Trinity’s latex bodysuit in “The Matrix,” Roesch
and his partner at the time, Hilda Hodges, used “crunchy, scrunchy leather.”
“Schindler’s List” was “the ultimate realism project”—one struggle was
finding a sonically accurate typewriter.

Roden, who grew up in western New York and studied at Ithaca College,
entered the industry in the nineties. For a time, she did Foley for a small,
low-budget studio that specialized in horror and adventure films. (“Volcano,
tornado, earthquake,” she said.) On the side, she studied the work of Foley
veterans such as Marko Costanzo. “ ‘Barton Fink,’ there was a wallpaper
peel that was just beautiful,” she told me. She learned that Costanzo used
two hinges to make door sounds more complex. “From that point forward, I
used two props for everything.”

The Foley world is small. Roesch likes to say that there are more astronauts
on earth than there are working Foley artists. (He estimates that there are
currently about a hundred active practitioners in the U.S.) In 2008, Roesch,
who had met Roden several years prior, asked whether she wanted to head
up the night crew at his Foley stage. In 2016, she joined Skywalker Sound as
Roesch’s partner. The two make an unlikely pair. Roesch is jocular and
outgoing—he hosts a podcast about postproduction with his daughter, called
“The Right Scuff,” and conducted several hundred Zoom interviews during
the pandemic for a Facebook group of sound professionals. Roden has a
humble, almost studious air; in her spare time, she has been drawing
sketches for an animated short film, based on Frank Hurley’s photographs of
the Shackleton expedition, which she plans to score with a rich, Foley-
inflected soundscape. Roden and Roesch have a warm patter. They share a
fresh-faced enthusiasm, as if they cannot quite believe what they get to do
for a living.

Skywalker Sound sits on Skywalker Ranch, a sprawling, peaceful paradise

in Nicasio, California, about an hour north of San Francisco. It is enclosed
by hills, which are dotted with cattle; mention the cattle, and someone will
inevitably note the ranch’s Wagyu operation. (The beef is served in
Skywalker-owned restaurants in San Francisco, and in a lodge-like campus
cafeteria.) The grounds are landscaped so that the buildings, arranged around
a swimmable lake, are concealed from one another by a variety of native
trees. Walking the ranch’s wooded paths, I felt as if I were at an upscale
rehab facility, or the sort of Northern Californian retreat that caters to
business executives and people whose marriages are failing. It was a
bucolic, pastoral setting for the production of mass indoor entertainment.

The Foley stage where Roesch and Roden work is housed in a large,
retrofitted barn, painted baby blue, that had had a previous life as George
Lucas’s personal garage. It looked, to me, like the aftermath of a crisis. In
the center was a large dirt area, flanked by two water pits; one had a
mattress-size slab of foam draped over it to absorb extra sounds. The room
had a variety of flooring zones—steel, wood, concrete—and along the
perimeter were all manner of buckets, ladders, electronics, mops, shovels,
trunks, suitcases, full-sized wooden doors, carpets, ropes, planks, poles,
blankets, and car tires. There was a working shower and toilet, used
exclusively for sound effects.

Roden and Roesch guided me through their prop collections. Footsteps are
considered one of the hardest aspects of Foley, and the two each had their
own shoe rack, with dozens of loafers, heels, pumps, boots, and sandals.
“The ultimate goal, for me, anyway, is to make sure the feet are as real as
possible,” Roesch said. Roden fished around in her desk, and pulled out a
latex Halloween mask of the Tin Man, which had torn at the mouth. She
crumpled the mask, and it made a yawning, chhhhh sound. “I’ve had this
forever,” she said. “So reliable.” She had recently ordered another mask,
from Amazon, but found it too high-pitched and thin; subtle changes in
modern materials and manufacturing affect her work. “Things that are
passed down from earlier generations are really, really treasures to me,” she
said. When her former Foley partner Rick Partlow retired, he gave her a
copper towel bar from his mother’s apartment, with a koi fish on each end
which, when twisted, made a screech like a startled cat. “This squeak is one
of a kind,” she said. “I’m never gonna find anything like this.”

“The navigation says that we’re wasting our time and should never have left home.”
Cartoon by Lonnie Millsap

In the back of the barn was a collection of props categorized by sound.

There were boxes of bones and shells, ribbons, roller skates, coconuts, party
supplies, gloves, military helmets, tennis racquets, horse tack, grenades
(inert), doorknobs, fishing reels, chain mail, pearls, diapers, pet collars,
walkie-talkies, beanbags, Velcro straps, and Christmas bells. There were
boxes with handwritten labels: “POPPERS + FARTERS,” “SQUEAKERS +
MOO-ERS,” “SNAPPERS, CLACKERS,” and “MAGICAL BELLS.” There
were “SHOVEL SHINGERS” and “TUBULAR (PLASTIC) THONKS.” There
was a box labelled “HOOVES,” which did not contain any actual hooves,
and a box labelled “UNDENIABLY MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS,” which
contained musical instruments. Off to one side was a car door that had been
used for the DeLorean in “Back to the Future”; elsewhere was the “boing
box” that gave life to the cartoon rabbit in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” and
the inertia-starter motor, from a nineteen-twenties biplane, that provided
sounds for the Tasmanian Devil from Looney Tunes. Roesch looked around
the room fondly. “They all have a personality,” he said. “David Fein’s shing
is in here,” Roden said, pulling out a shapely, worn piece of metal, and
handling it like a historic artifact—which it was, in a sense. The prop had
been passed down from David Lee Fein, a Foley artist known for his work
on movies such as “RoboCop,” “Speed,” “American History X,” and “The
Godfather: Part III.”

George Lucas has said that fifty per cent of the cinematic experience is
sound, and people who work in sound like to quote him. Certain directors
share this view. Fincher, who has worked with Roesch—and, later, Roden
and Curtis—on nearly all of his films, has developed a reputation as a sound
obsessive. “ ‘Fight Club’ has a lot of intra-body punishment,” Fincher told
me. “Some of the greatest punches in the history of cinema have to be Ben
Burtt’s stuff for ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark.’ They were spectacular. But when
we used that kind of stuff in ‘Fight Club’ they just felt like movie punches. It
felt like a glorification. When you hear somebody really get hit—and I’m
not talking about professional prizefighters but regular idiots outside a bar—
a lot of times it’s pretty underwhelming. But there is something about when
it’s right, and it’s awful, and it makes you kind of squint—that’s what we
were looking for. The ‘Raiders’ stuff is exquisite to the ear. It’s beautifully
done. But it’s also hyperbolic in a kind of escapist way.” In “Fight Club,” he
said, “we wanted to make sure that when they were beating on each other it
was like punching a sack of potatoes—that it didn’t hyperbolize it in a way
that made it sexy.”

Fincher estimated that ninety-nine per cent of the sound effects in his own
films are added in postproduction: “We’re looking to make sure that the
sound of the cloth, or the sound of the leather, or the squeak of the
upholstery is right. You know, is it Naugahyde? Are we saying that this is
the conference room of a very, very moneyed law firm in San Francisco, or
are we saying it’s a mall lawyer? And would you want the chair of a mall
lawyer to have more of a pleather, slow sound?”

An essential part of Foley is creating a consistent, coherent reality—which,

in the hyperreal world of cinema, is fundamentally skewed. Foley artists
often speak of “selling” a sound: making it legible and credible, even when
it is dramatized. Deception is an essential part of the enterprise. Things are
not as they sound. “You say, ‘This sound is so unbelievably creepy,’ ” Lynch
told me. “And they say, ‘It’s my kid’s sweater.’ ” It is incredibly hard to
reverse engineer a well-crafted sound effect, particularly if it is first
experienced in the context of a visual. There is no way to know, for
example, that, for the sound of hatching dinosaur eggs in “Jurassic Park,”
the Foley artist Dennie Thorpe layered the cracking sounds of crushed ice-
cream cones with the juicy effect of a hand in a melon. Fincher told me that
experimentation was crucial. “Sometimes you hear a sound and you say,
‘That’s amazing, what is that?’ ” he said. “It’s, like, ‘Well, that’s yogurt, shot
through a hollowed-out tennis-ball can.’ And you go, ‘All right, don’t tell
me, I don’t want to know.’ ”

Roden estimated that only twenty per cent of sounds onscreen are generated
by the actual objects represented. This presents certain challenges: when a
sound cannot be described by its referent, language starts to falter. Over
time, Roesch, Roden, and Curtis have developed a lexicon to describe what
they want. Sounds are poofy, slimy, or naturale; they might need to be
slappier, or raspier, or nebby (nebulous). They are hingey, ticky, boxy, zippy,
or clacky; they are tonal, tasty, punchy, splattery, smacky, spanky. They
might be described phonetically—a “kachunk-kachunk-kachunk,” or a
“scritcher”—or straightforwardly (“fake”). Tools, too, have their own
names. Shings make shiny metallic sounds—a sword being drawn from its
scabbard—and wronkers give the impression of metal sliding across a hard
surface. “Like, chhhrtz,” Roesch clarified.

On a recent spring afternoon, Roesch, Roden, and Curtis were gathered in a

sound booth, watching a clip from an upcoming Pixar film, “Lightyear”—a
prequel of sorts to “Toy Story.” Animated films present their own
challenges, not least because they emerge completely silent, aside from
dialogue. “There is no organic soul,” Roesch said. “You need to help bring
that soul to it, that feeling of aliveness.” The previous week, the trio had
been working on sounds for a writhing mass of enormous tentacled sentient
vines that, in one high-octane scene, entangle and attack Buzz Lightyear.
The group had agreed that the vines needed to sound splattery and girthy
—“the guts will sell it, like kind of gushy, high-end watery,” Roden said—
but still thicker than water. The artists had landed on a combination of foam
padding, suction cups from the bottom of a bathtub mat, a silky cloth, the
Tin Man mask, a chamois, and a mophead. The result sounded genuinely
menacing, and a little disgusting.

Cartoon by Sarah Kempa

Because fantastical films tend to feature creatures, landscapes, and materials

that do not exist in the real world, they come with few sonic references.
Directors suggest a mood or a feeling, and Foley artists are left to figure it
out. (There is an element of chance to this: the Foley artist Ronni Brown told
me that, for the 2017 remake of “The Mummy,” she was asked to give the
mummy a “dry, stretchy, painful” sound—one she pinned down only after
spotting, and fondling, a bowl of potpourri in a rest room. “I touch
everything,” she said.) For the Pixar film “Soul,” Roesch, Roden, and Curtis
were tasked with creating the sound of an ethereal bridge stretching to the
afterlife. “You couldn’t tell what they were walking on, these little souls,”
Roden said. “It was described to us as kind of glassy, kind of magical.” They
wound up using a large, thick broken window that Roden had picked up off
the side of the road—“We take the scraps, we’re seagulls,” she said. This
was balanced atop a conga drum, and gently tapped with a mallet.

At the beginning of a project, the team receives a cue sheet, detailing every
moment in a production that needs a sound. For the most part, the Foley
team interprets the mood of the performances. “We’re in this house. How
gritty is the floor? Or how clean is it?” Curtis said. “She’s in high heels.
O.K., how pretty are these high heels? What’s her character like in relation
to those high heels?”

“It’s not necessarily you see a shoe, you do that shoe,” Roden said.

“It’s whatever you believe in,” Roesch said.

The cue sheet for “Lightyear” had more than a thousand entries. Not every
cue would make it into the final mix, a reality the team addressed with
admirable ego detachment. When a sound gets cut or drowned out, Roden
told me, she tries to take the attitude “I had fun making it. I loved it. It was
loved at one point.”

That morning, Roesch was focussed on “bed stuff”—cloth work. He was

wearing loose gray sweatpants and a black cotton zip-up; Roden wore yoga
pants. The microphones on Foley stages are incredibly sensitive, and Foley
artists wear soft clothing to reduce interference. (For “The Ten
Commandments,” from 1956, Foley artists, recording the sound of
bricklaying in a tank of mud and water, were reportedly instructed to work
in the nude.) For each cue, Curtis plays the clip on a large screen, and Roden
or Roesch assembles accessories. Once the materials are ready, the recording
light goes on, and the room goes dark. The clip plays, and the Foley artists
perform in synch with the picture. The clips are often looped, with a brief
pause between takes, allowing the artists multiple attempts at each sound.
Curtis’s view of the Foley stage is blocked by a vast computer monitor, an
intentional obstruction: seeing how a sound is created would spoil his ability
to evaluate its accuracy and effectiveness. (The Foley artists I spoke to all
emphasized the importance of the Foley mixer, whose judgments and
interventions are critical.)

Onscreen, Buzz Lightyear and his animatronic cat, Sox, sat down on the bed.
There had been some previous discussion about how to animate Sox; Roesch
had experimented with a matted battery-operated plush cat, fished out of his
desk, before deeming the sounds “too furry,” and replacing the stuffed
animal with a marker rubbed against foam. That morning, Sox sounded cute,
but not cuddly; catlike, but not quite mammalian. In bed, Lightyear was
restive: he lay back, turned on his side, turned on his back, pulled his sleep
mask down, then placed his hand on the sheet. Roesch rustled his assembled
objects, and recorded the sequence. There was a pause, and then Curtis, from
the booth, voiced an objection. “It’s a hangnail kind of thing,” he said, a
description Roesch seemed to immediately understand.

There was some discussion about sweetening the sound with a higher zjuzz;
ultimately, they added a light shhsl to the sheet sounds, for dramatic effect.
The reel switched to a scene of a robot drawing a line on a whiteboard.
Roesch mimicked the robot’s gestures with an actual marker and
whiteboard. The marker, unfortunately, did not sound enough like a marker.
“Want me to give you a little bit of squeak?” Roesch asked.

On the sidelines, I fished through my tote bag, and surreptitiously tried to

put a piece of gum in my mouth. Roesch, who had moved on to scratching at
a block of foam tucked inside a metal suitcase, which was draped with a
bomber jacket, turned to me between takes. “Lotta good props in your
handbag,” he said, pointedly.

Skywalker Sound is owned by Disney, though about half of its Foley artists’
work is for outside clients. Disney has long been accused of being a near-
monopoly in the film industry, and its blockbuster factory relies heavily on
sequels, prequels, remakes, and extensions of its franchises. These are all
immensely profitable, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are good.
Still, Disney is one of the few places that employ full-time Foley teams.
There is an element of precariousness to the profession, particularly as
recording and editing software, such as Pro Tools, has allowed the richness
of certain sounds to be approximated through digital layering. Many Foley
artists now work as independent contractors, rather than in-house, despite
the growing number of projects that require their talents, from shows on
streaming platforms to video games.

Driving home over the Golden Gate Bridge, I thought about the way
corporations can ensnare even the most delicate and specific of crafts—and
the juxtaposition of expensive, mediocre entertainment and the personal,
meticulous work that goes into them. I was indifferent to Buzz Lightyear and
had no interest in seeing an animated film giving the origin story of a
fictional toy. Yet it had been thrilling to watch the characters come to life—
to emerge from silence into fully realized sonic beings, the way that static on
an old television set might arrange itself into distinct images. In any case,
the craft’s aesthetic ideal isn’t beauty but believability.

A few weeks later, my household received a visit from a relative who is six
years old and likes buttons. He came into our home and inspected the
appliances. As my husband showed him how to operate the espresso
machine, our small relative added his own vocalized sound effects: whirs,
purrs, pew-pews, ka-chinks. These were the kinds of mechanical sound that
exist almost exclusively in the realm of fantasy—more like comic-book
rocket launches than like the Bunsen-burner hiss of actual space shuttles—
and I assumed they came from his preferred entertainment vehicles, such as
“Peppa Pig” and “Cars.” In “The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural
Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933,” Thompson,
the historian of technology, writes, “Like a landscape, a soundscape is
simultaneously a physical environment and a way of perceiving that
environment; it is both a world and a culture constructed to make sense of
that world.” The soundscapes of cartoon hyperreality were the soundscapes
my relative was familiar with, and he sought to re-create them in the world
around him—to make things more legible, perhaps, or just more fun. It was
as if he were adding his own sweeteners to reality.

Sound is a way to interpret and imagine the world—invisibly, and on a near-

subterranean level. Much of cinematic sound is in service to a real feeling,
but, in the face of feeling, sheer realism fails. For the cinematic release of
1979’s “Apocalypse Now,” Walter Murch, a film editor and sound designer,
added a channel of infrasound—sound waves at a frequency below the
threshold of human audibility—to vibrate viewers’ chest cavities. Murch is
renowned for his impressionistic sound design, what he calls “metaphoric”
audio: a sensuous, sonic ambiguity, intended to stimulate the imagination
and act on a near-subconscious level. “Sound sneaks up on you,” he told me.
“You are less consciously aware of it than when you look at something. That
actually gives us who work in sound a great power, because we can
influence how people experience things, without them being aware of it.” In
“The Godfather,” he famously layered the sound of an elevated subway train
over a scene in which Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino, murders a
rival at a quiet Italian restaurant in the Bronx. The train rumbles and
screeches in the background as Michael girds himself for the hit. “We’re
using it creatively, in a musical sense, to get at something about Michael’s
interior state,” Murch said. “There’s nothing visual that says there should be
an elevated train here, so the audience feels a certain something, and yet
they ascribe it to the acting talents of Al Pacino.”

“Look, Dennis, if you’re serious about being in this gang, you need to rip off those sleeves for real.”
Cartoon by Zachary Kanin

Lynch described sound design as an intuitive process, one that relied on both
experimentation and precision. “Let’s say there’s a woman sitting, and she’s
sewing a little decal onto a sweater for her daughter. Her daughter’s sleeping
in the other room. It’s late at night. It’s very dim light. She’s close, making
stitches. Coming into her house unbeknown to her is a man who’s broken in
and he’s coming upstairs from the basement. And he’s listening. And she,
upstairs, is setting the scissors down on this sewing machine, this metal part,
and it makes a little click, and he hears this little click, and he starts going up
the stairs, and the stairs are carpeted, so it’s real quiet. Very, very quiet. . . .
Every moment is do or die! You’ve gotta guide this whole massive thing for
two hours plus. Everything is critical.”

For all the advances in audio technologies, the fundamentals of making

Foley have largely escaped the spectre of digitization. “I feel like a shoe
cobbler,” Jana Vance, a Foley artist, told me. “We’re still making things with
our hands, or with our feet.” Attempts to automate the work of Foley artists,
such as SoundDroid, from the eighties, or AutoFoley, from 2020, tend to
produce sounds that don’t compare. Roesch suggested that computer-
generated sound effects could someday be as good as computer-generated
imagery, particularly with the help of a human operator. “The A.I. will look
at footsteps, look at the signal, and make recommendations,” he speculated.
It wasn’t a future he seemed to relish. “The bottom line is, the beauty of
Foley is its originality and soul,” he said. “Each cue, each footstep, even, has
the potential for beauty.” Vance said, “I’ve done Harrison Ford for a few
different films. I know how he moves, I know his footsteps. Whenever I get
him, I look forward to revisiting my character again.” Software does not
have this intuition.

Today’s real-world soundscapes are rich with the thrums and hiccups of
digital technology: chirping cell phones, irate laptop fans, the unsettling,
quiet whine of electric vehicles. There are humming electrical cables and
clicking traffic lights and the well-intended hush of white-noise machines.
There are drones, and G.P.S., and the ambient sounds of A.T.M.s and
automatic doors and air-conditioners and hot-water heaters. There is Alexa.
In certain remote, rural areas, residents can register the low vibration of far-
off server farms. Container ships generate underwater noise. The world is
getting louder. The same is true onscreen: C.G.I. has multiplied the number
of visuals that require sound effects. “We have to create all these sounds that
have never been created before,” Roden said. “Like Transformers, and
anything in Marvel movies. Thanos—his glove, his gauntlet. Magical
details, dust.” Vance said, “Things have really drifted from the natural
world. Everything has to be a little bit bolder, a little bit bigger. You have all
these monsters, often—they’ll want things from us, like the skin movement,
claws.”

Theatres now have higher-fidelity sound systems: Dolby’s widely used

Atmos system has more than a hundred channels of sound, routed through as
many as sixty-four speakers. Audiences have become accustomed to hearing
all the details. “ ‘Dunkirk,’ I had earplugs on,” Roden said. “I worked on
‘Dunkirk.’ ” She made a noise—a kind of mnnh—in imitation of movie-
theatre subwoofers. It sounded like getting passed by a tractor trailer on the
freeway. “The low end affects me viscerally—I actually get sick to my
stomach,” she said. Roden prefers to watch movies made in the forties, the
fifties, and the sixties—bank heists, jailbreaks, and French film noir. She had
recently watched Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le Samouraï,” from 1967. Many of
the film’s sound effects were recorded during production, on the same track
as the dialogue. “The men’s shoes are made of a different material, and you
hear them echoing off these alleyways,” Roden said. “The grit on their feet
—so nasty. It sounds like they’re wearing women’s shoes, they’re very high-
pitched. But it works so great for this gritty, film-noir French movie. I love
it. Love that film. But to do it today—oh, my gosh, I would probably be
fired.”

During the spring, as I spoke with Foley artists and watched them at work, I
grew increasingly attuned to the various elements of soundscapes around
me: the clicking scramble of gravel, the thud of a bag of frozen strawberries,
the soft shuffle of a pregnant friend, the syncopated hop of a three-legged
bichon frise. Though I am not an audile, I appreciated the chance to
experience my surroundings with a different quality of consciousness. In the
studio at Skywalker Sound, watching Roesch and Roden perfect footsteps
for the characters in “Lightyear”—adjusting the tone and emotion by
shifting their weight, moving from the sides to the soles of their shoes, the
elegance and precision, like tap-dancing in slow motion—I ascended to an
almost hallucinatory level of attention. Movies felt richer, sometimes to the
point of distraction; a showing of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” felt
like a maximalist sound bath. It wasn’t until I was on a plane, watching
“Roman Holiday,” its quiet, nineteen-fifties plaza café augmented by the
fizzes and snaps of the in-flight beverage service, that I realized the greatest
complement to Foley: silence. ♦
Poems

“Fracture Story”
“The Bread, the Butter, the Orange Marmalade”
By Nell Wright

Content

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

Audio: Read by the author.

It was a beautiful place, horizon on all sides

like diner mirrors. I sped
toward its limit and hit the asphalt hard. My arm

in the X-ray glowed like a jellyfish at night

and I wanted to slip into its ocean and go
totally numb. I wanted

to fix what I’d done, but the doctor said

Stay patient, massaging my plaster
with soap. On the radio they spoke

about a meteor shower, so we spread old

towels in the darkest back yard. While we waited
someone laid out an endless riddle

about albatrosses. Cannibalism was the answer.

Inside me, minerals were mending themselves,
sending collagen threads across

the bad chasm I’d made. From behind a wide cloud slid
stars like flecks of bone, old and glowing.
They held their breaths. When one dashed

across the black, I think I gasped

admiring the platonic plummet: it left
no fallen body. No broken heft.

In the morning I got up and walked

to the laundromat. Mountains ran
a cardiogram across the sky. Inside
two parts of me were reaching
toward each other—something I’d felt
before, but more in the mind. I started

to forgive myself. It
was a physical place. Hard
to be lonely carrying that slow embrace.
By Mary Jo Bang

Content

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

Audio: Read by the author.

Nothing was what I wanted. The bread, white

chalk. The butter, rancidity. The marmalade,
bitterness. The nail on my right hand, the ragged
ending to a difficult day. He’d said, Oh, really,

you’re wearing that? I was, I said. But now

there was no room for me in the room.
The lights were too bright. Always a problem
when windows faced the sun. Especially

when the sky showed its face for too long.

No rain for days, then, suddenly, rain. I’d worn
the red shoes and now they would be ruined.
How to care less. That phrase, “I couldn’t

care less,” as if zero were already a viewpoint.

There were two doors into the house: the front
door, which was rarely used, and the side door,
which was accessed by entering the screened

porch where my stepfather’s wood was stacked

against the wall. A tall bin of nails anchored
the corner. What was he building now?
The baby was heavy in my arms. If I put him

down, he’d undoubtedly wake. I could tell, time

was a migraine heading straight for my right eye.
The waking baby’s cry would be an expert knife
through injured flesh. It was that kind of a season.

This is drawn from “A Film in Which I Play Everyone.”

Profiles

The Gospel According to Mavis Staples

By David Remnick

Content

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

Mavis Staples has been a gospel singer longer than Elizabeth II has worn the
crown. During concerts, sometimes, she might take a seat and rest while
someone in her band bangs out a solo for a chorus or two. No one minds.
Her stage presence is so unfailingly joyful—her nickname is Bubbles—that
you never take your eyes off her. Staples sings from her depths, with low
moans and ragged, seductive growls that cut through even the most pious
lyric. She is sanctified, not sanctimonious. In her voice, “Help Me Jesus” is
as suggestive as “Let’s Do It Again.” When she was a girl, singing with her
family ensemble, the Staple Singers, churchgoers across the South Side of
Chicago would wonder how a contralto so smoky and profound could issue
from somebody so young.

She is eighty-two. While singers a fraction of her age go to great lengths to

preserve their voices, drinking magical potions and warming up with the
obsessive care of a gymnast, she doesn’t hold back. Time, polyps, and a
casual disdain for preservation have conspired to narrow her range and sand
down her old shimmer, but she is not about to hum lightly through a
rehearsal. A little ginger tea and onward she goes. Singing is what connects
her to the world.

Sly, sociable, and funny, Staples reminds you of your mother’s most reliable
and cheerful friend, the one who comes around with good gossip and a
strawberry pie. Her cheeks are round and smooth; her hair is done in a
copper bob; her resting expression is one of delight. “She is a ray of
sunshine,” Bonnie Raitt, her frequent touring companion, said. “She’s never
cranky. She has an abiding belief in God and His plan and believes the world
is moving toward a higher and more loving world.” Staples has spent the
past few decades lending her voice to a startling range of collaborators:
Prince, Arcade Fire, Nona Hendryx, Ry Cooder, David Byrne. Anyone who
has something to say, she’ll help them say it, in an inimitable gospel voice.
One collaborator, Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco, said, “All day long, Mavis is
having a good time. She’s excited about making music and just being alive. I
hope I have that energy when I’m her age, but the truth is I don’t even have
it now.”

And yet life has its way of wearing down even the most radiant spirit. For
two years, during the worst of the pandemic, Staples stayed home in
Chicago—she lives in a modern high-rise overlooking Lake Michigan—and
was, like just about everyone else in the music business, unable to perform
or record. She watched cable news and saw the ravaging effect that Covid-19
was having on folks her age. She didn’t go out, and she let no one in. For
company, she’d pick up her phone and check in with “the Twitter people.”
The empty days went on and on. “Oh, man, I hated it,” she said. There was
only one thing left to do. “I’d start singing around the house. Mostly our old
stuff, the songs we started singing when I was a kid: ‘Didn’t It Rain,’ ‘Help
Me Jesus.’ ”

The pandemic was the least of it. The passage of time has relentlessly
winnowed the comforts of her old life. For decades, she performed in the
cocoon of a family that was remarkably warm, loving, and coöperative.
Compared with the Jacksons, the Turners, or the Beach Boys, the Staple
Singers is a story free of dark drama. But now the other members of Mavis
Staples’s family—her father, Roebuck; her mother, Oceola; her brother,
Pervis; her sisters, Cleotha, Cynthia, and Yvonne—are gone. “It’s just me
now,” she said. She’s left with memories of a bygone world: back-yard
barbecues at the Staples place, with Redd Foxx, Aretha Franklin, and
Mahalia Jackson piling their plates with ribs and creamed corn; starlit rides
in the family Cadillac, touring the gospel capitals of the Deep South; singing
“Why? (Am I Treated So Bad)” at rallies before Martin Luther King, Jr.,
delivered an oration. “Ghosts,” as Staples put it to me one day. “So many
ghosts.”

We were having lunch at a restaurant downstairs from her apartment, and

Staples was saying that even now she dreams about her family. Like anyone
of a certain age, she has a quarry of stories she mines to explain the shape of
her life. She tells these stories expertly, as if each time were the first. She is
an entertainer, after all. But, when the matter of loss comes up, there is no
sense of performance. She takes a deep breath and lets herself settle, as if to
say, This is the important thing about me. Her father—everyone called him
Pops—died in 2000, just after the Staple Singers were inducted into the
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. She still misses him, she says, so much that he
shows up in her dreams to give her advice: “And, when I wake up, I be so
mad that it was just a dream!” Pops, a son of the Mississippi Delta, was the
paterfamilias, soft-spoken and kind. He sang, wrote songs, assembled the set
lists, booked the dates, ran the business. The sole instrumentalist in the
group, he played a bluesy Fender guitar, surrounding the vocal lines with a
spare, tremolo sound. For years, his absence onstage left Staples feeling
adrift. “I was having a hard time,” she said. “I didn’t hear Daddy’s guitar.”

Staples tried singing alone for a while, with a hired band of musicians, and
she let her sister Yvonne, who never liked being in front of a crowd, focus
on business matters. But, when the loneliness got to be too much, Staples
persuaded her to come back onstage. “Yvonne was with us on tour for about
ten years,” Rick Holmstrom, Staples’s guitar player, said. “They had
adjoining rooms. They were constantly talking and bickering. That kept
Mavis from being lonely.” Then it became evident that Yvonne, like Cleotha
before her, was developing Alzheimer’s. “When Yvonne got to the point
where she had a hard time knowing where she was, or started wandering
away from the microphone, it distracted Mavis onstage,” Holmstrom said.
“Finally, Yvonne stayed home and her friend Penny took care of her. Mavis
couldn’t imagine being on the road without family. I was worried about her.
When Yvonne started to fade, I thought Mavis might retire.” Yvonne died in
2018.

Staples no longer goes to church on Sundays. She hasn’t lost her faith; she’s
lost the habit. She still sends her tithe to Trinity United Church of Christ, in
Chicago—Jeremiah Wright’s old church—but she hasn’t been there for
years. “I can go in my closet and pray,” Staples said. “I don’t have to go to
church. The church is a building. I’m the church.” She works out her deepest
dilemmas at home, but with a little help. “The other day, I was talking about
retiring, but then I thought, What would I do?” she said. “I just felt like,
Why is this eighty-two-year-old woman going up onstage with these kids? I
don’t want to burden nobody. Speedy, my road manager, has to help me get
in the van. I use a wheelchair in the airport. Some beds are too high and I
have to take a running leap! I talked to the Lord. I asked him, ‘Why am I
still here? My whole family is gone. What do you want of me? What am I
supposed to do? Have you kept me up for a reason?’ And the only reason I
could see is to sing my songs.”
It’s impossible to locate the precise birthplace of something as various as the
blues, but one of its most effective incubators was a ten-thousand-acre
plantation in Sunflower County, Mississippi, founded in 1895 by an
eccentric white businessman named Will Dockery. At its peak, as many as
four hundred Black families lived and worked on Dockery Farms. Most
were sharecroppers who harvested cotton and a variety of other crops.
Dockery was of Scottish descent, wore a dark suit every day, abstained from
drinking and smoking, and believed in modesty and moral uplift. His
plantation was a self-enclosed agrarian universe, with its own cotton gin, a
sawmill, a commissary, a post office, and two churches (Methodist and
Baptist). It even had its own currency. The sharecroppers lived in old
boxcars and rough-hewn cabins.

“I don’t like to tattle, but Pfc. Dinny Hodge, Second Battalion, Fox Company Third Platoon, Second Squad, Fourth Fire Team is carrying leftover toast, canned beans, and a partly
eaten apple in his Browning automatic-rifle magazine vest, instead of his ammo, sir.”
Cartoon by George Booth

The Staples family was among the Dockery farmers. Roebuck Staples (his
parents had great esteem for the mail-order giant of the day, Sears, Roebuck
& Co.) was the youngest of fourteen children. He was raised singing praise
songs, but the blues was in the air—in juke joints and general stores, on
street corners and in barrelhouses. Dockery Farms and the surrounding
towns produced an astonishing crop of blues players, including Robert
Johnson, Son House, McKinley Morganfield (a.k.a. Muddy Waters), and
Chester Arthur Burnett (a.k.a. Howlin’ Wolf). Roebuck listened to them all.
But the crucial progenitor was Charley Patton, a boastful, lusty, sometimes
violent man who played guitar and sang with alarming ferocity. Long before
Magic Slim or Jimi Hendrix came along, Patton entertained listeners by
playing his guitar between his legs and behind his back. Roebuck heard him
at the Holly Ridge Store and thought, “If I ever get to be a man, I’m gonna
get me a guitar and play the blues.” As a teen-ager, Roebuck made ten cents
a day feeding hogs and chickens. He put those coins together to buy his first
guitar, a Stella acoustic, and soon developed a fingerpicking style that drew
on all he was hearing around him. The blues, he once said, “got into me, and
into my sound, and into my fingers.”

When Roebuck was eighteen, he married Oceola Ware, who was two years
younger. In 1936, they joined the Black migration north, ending up on the
South Side of Chicago. Early on, Oceola was a hotel maid. Roebuck worked
as a bricklayer, in a steel mill, and in a vast and fragrant slaughterhouse that
was known in town as the House of Blood.

Roebuck had moved from one musical mecca to another. Chicago was the
locus of urban blues and the center of the burgeoning gospel scene. “I don’t
care where anybody else comes from or what anybody else does, Chicago is
the capital of gospel and always will be,” the singer Albertina Walker once
said. Gospel music has sources in both English revival hymns and the
spirituals sung in America since the arrival of Black men and women, but
the godfather of Chicago’s particular brand of gospel—a genre both
sanctified and blues-inflected—was Thomas A. Dorsey. Born in rural
Georgia in 1899, Dorsey was a prodigy, a pianist who got his education in
church pews and revival tents and his early work experience in barrelhouses,
brothels, and bars. After moving to Chicago, around 1919, he built a
reputation playing behind Ma Rainey. But he was intent on bringing the
energy of the juke joint to more hallowed ground. In Sunday services,
Dorsey encouraged handclapping, foot stomping, and improvisation. He was
determined to defy the conventions of the more conservative churches and
provide some uplift in miserable economic times. He’d had a hit, in the
nineteen-twenties, with “It’s Tight Like That”; now, as the Depression
settled in, he was writing songs in the mode of “If You See My Saviour.” In
1932, while Dorsey was on the road, his wife, Nettie Harper, died in
childbirth; their child died a day later. In the wake of that tragedy, Dorsey
wrote “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” a song that became so central to the
gospel canon that Mahalia Jackson sang it at Dr. King’s funeral.

Dorsey helped construct the musical world in which Roebuck Staples and
his family took up residence. Even while working exhausting days at the
slaughterhouse, Roebuck made extra money performing at parties and
churches: “I’d do the gospel on Sunday. Pick up three dollars at the joint,
five dollars from the offering plate at church, and make eight dollars for the
weekend and live high on the hog when my peers were happy just to get the
three dollars. But I wanted to be playing only gospel even then.” For a time,
he sang with a group called the Trumpet Jubilees. But he grew dismayed by
the group’s indiscipline and decided to try something new, closer to home.
One day in 1948, he gathered his children in a circle to teach them the
church harmonies he had learned in Mississippi. The first song they worked
on was “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a tune taken up by country
ensembles like the Carter Family. In their living room, Pops drilled his
children on that song for days. “Mavis was headstrong and stubborn,” he
told Greg Kot, Mavis’s biographer. “It took her almost two years before she
could catch on to her part.”

Staples acknowledges that she was a resistant pupil at first. “I didn’t like to
rehearse,” she told me. “Pops said, ‘Mavis, your voice is a gift that God gave
you. If you don’t use it, he’ll take it back.’ I was the first one in rehearsal
after that.”

One afternoon, Staples and I drove around the South Side, passing through
her old neighborhood, “the Dirty Thirties,” and beyond. She pointed out her
school, the churches where she prayed and performed, the site of the Regal
Theatre—the Apollo of Chicago, now long gone. But it was only when we
drove past the place where she lived and sang in those first rehearsals that
she really came to life. “When my aunt Katie came and heard us rehearsing
one time, she said, ‘Shucks, y’all sound pretty good. I believe I want y’all to
come sing in my church Sunday,’ ” Staples recalled. “We were glad to have
somewhere to sing that wasn’t the living-room floor.” The next Sunday, the
Staples family sang at a Baptist church in the neighborhood. The shouts
from the pews—the ultimate currency of approval—were startling, but they
also posed a problem. “We didn’t know about encores,” Staples said. “We
just had the one song. So we sang it three times.”
Staples knew from an early age that if she was going to sing in public it
could only be gospel music. Sometimes, when Pops was struggling to
support the family, Mavis and Yvonne were sent to live with Oceola’s
mother, in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, and one day Mavis took part in a
school talent show there. Without thinking much, she sang “Since I Fell for
You,” a jukebox hit by Ella and Buddy Johnson. When Grandma Ware found
out, she was furious: “Oh, you was singing the blues, huh?” Out came the
switch.

“I got the worst whipping in my life!” Staples said. “She sent me back to
school with my little short dress on, my legs had pink welts. I started
printing letters to my mother. I said, ‘Mama, I want to come home. Grandma
won’t let me sing!’ ”

Pops was a stickler, too. Forget about the kids singing the blues: in those
days, he wouldn’t even let them play cards. But he was excited about the
offers they were getting after that one-song première. He taught the kids to
sing “Tell Heaven,” “Too Close,” and what became, in 1956, their first
recorded hit, “Uncloudy Day.” From the start, the Staple Singers were a
distinctively old-fashioned group in the quartet tradition. Their haunting,
down-home church harmonies reminded listeners of earlier times. “When we
first went on the road, people thought we were old people because we were
singing such old songs,” Staples said. The one departure from tradition was
Pops’s guitar—a rarity in those days, and a “devilish” instrument to some. It
was only later that many other gospel groups, like the Mighty Clouds of Joy
and the Dixie Hummingbirds, hired guitar players to accompany them.

The old neighborhood was rich in musical talent. Staples developed a crush
on Sam Cooke, who lived nearby, and routinely encountered the stars of the
gospel world, including her role model, Mahalia Jackson. “My name is
Mavis,” she shyly told the singer on their first meeting. “I sing, too.”

“Oh, you do?”

“Yes, Ma’am. With my father and my brother and my sisters.”

“I want to hear you.”

“Well, you’ll hear me, because I sing loud.”

In the early nineteen-fifties, Roebuck decided that the Staple Singers were a
business. While Mavis was still in school, they would set out touring for
long weekends on the “gospel highway,” a circuit of Southern churches,
school gymnasiums, and V.F.W. halls. They crossed paths with the Soul
Stirrers, Lou Rawls and the Pilgrim Travelers, the Reverend C. L. Franklin
and his daughter Aretha. Mavis got used to finishing homework assignments
in boarding houses and modest hotel rooms across the Jim Crow South.

At the start of their touring days, she said, “Pops sat us down and said, ‘Now
listen, y’all, we’re going down South. It’s a different place. Everybody don’t
like you. And there’s certain things that you’ll see that’s going to be
different. If you want to drink water, if you see a sign that say “Colored,”
that’s the water fountain that you drink from. And, when you go in the store,
you have to be very careful.’ ”

Staples once considered stepping away from singing to become a nurse. Her father said, “Don’t you know you’re already a nurse?”Photograph by Steve Schapiro / Corbis / Getty

Many Black touring acts carried a copy of the Green Book, an annual
compendium published by Victor Hugo Green. The Green Book informed
them where they could find gas, food, and lodging, and warned them which
places had been designated “sundown towns”—dangerous for Black people
after dark. Even so, trouble was always around the corner: random arrests,
overnight stays in some dank drunk tank, white kids trying to run your car
off the road. No one who’d grown up on a gospel lyric like “Were you there
when they nailed Him to the tree?” failed to make the connection between a
crucifixion in the ancient world and the lynchings in modern America.
Staples, young as she was, knew the score. In 1955, when she was sixteen,
she read about the murder of Emmett Till, in Mississippi—not far from
where Pops grew up—and tried sending a message of condolence to Till’s
grieving mother.

When Staples finished high school, in 1957, Pops quit his job and declared it
possible for the Staple Singers to focus completely on their music. Staples
resisted, telling him that she wanted to study to be a nurse. “He said, ‘Mavis,
baby, don’t you know you’re already a nurse?’ ” she recalled. “ ‘Don’t you
know that when you be singing, and those people come around crying and
want to touch your hand, you’re making them feel better?’ ” Staples was not
the rebellious sort. The Staples were now a full-time concern. “Uncloudy
Day,” which the group had recorded with Vee-Jay Records the previous year,
was getting a lot of radio play; they were performing before bigger
audiences, on longer, multistate tours. (The Staples later expanded into
gospel-inflected soul and pop, on Riverside, Epic, Stax, and other labels.)
They even made guest appearances on network television.

Pops did not think of his family, at first, as a political enterprise, but he’d
been listening intently to Dr. King’s sermons on the radio, and, while the
Staple Singers were in Montgomery, Alabama, they went one Sunday to a
service at Dr. King’s church on Dexter Avenue. In a meeting afterward, King
made it plain to Pops that the Staple Singers had a role to play in the
movement. Enslaved people sang “Steal Away” on the plantations and
abolitionists sang “John Brown’s Body” during the Civil War, King once
reminded a reporter. “For the same reasons the slaves sang, Negroes today
sing freedom songs, for we, too, are in bondage.” That was the case he made
to Pops.

The family went back to their hotel, and Pops called his children to his
room. “I like this man’s message,” he said. “And I think that if he can preach
it, we can sing it.” In the early nineteen-sixties, the Staple Singers started
releasing “message songs”: “I’ve Been Scorned,” “Freedom Highway,”
“Long Walk to D.C.,” “Respect Yourself,” “When Will We Be Paid?,” and
Dr. King’s favorite, “Why? (Am I Treated So Bad).” Although they
maintained their restrained sound, their lyrics grew more insistently
political: “The whole wide world is wonderin’ what’s wrong with the United
States,” they sang in “Freedom Highway.” Those songs became as important
to the movement as Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” or the
Impressions’ “Keep on Pushing.” This was a commitment that Mavis
Staples would go on upholding. She admires the current crop of rappers
whose music is saturated with both politics and gospel influence—Chance
the Rapper and Kendrick Lamar among them—and doesn’t want to sing
only the songs of the civil-rights era. Disgusted by the election of Donald
Trump and the bigotry it enabled, she teamed up with her friend Jeff Tweedy
on an album of assertively political new material, “If All I Was Was Black.”

On those early Southern tours, stardom did not shield the Staples family
from the cruelties that they were singing about. One night in November,
1964, the group wrapped up a concert in Jackson, Mississippi, packed into
Pops’s Cadillac, and headed north toward home. It was Mavis’s turn at the
wheel, and around 1 a.m. she pulled in to a gas station, in Memphis, and
politely asked the attendant if he would fill the tank and clean the bug-
specked windshield. She also asked for a receipt. The attendant, a tall,
skinny white boy, ignored her request. As Staples told me the story: “He
said, ‘If you want a receipt, N-word, you come over to the office.’ ”

Pops, furious, told Mavis to pull the car up to the service-station office and
wait. He followed the attendant into the office, where they quickly got into a
shouting match.

“Let me tell you something,” the white boy yelled, again using the N-word.
Before the boy could continue his disquisition, Pops clocked him with a
right hand. “Pops had this pinkie ring on his finger,” Staples recalled, “and
blood spattered.” Pops, who was wearing slippers, slid on the greasy floor.
Mavis saw that the attendant had grabbed a crowbar and was coming toward
him. She woke Pervis, who’d been asleep, and he sprang up—“Pervis came
from under those coats and out of that car like Superman!”—and hustled his
father to safety. Mavis hit the gas, driving across the Mississippi into
Arkansas. But soon they were pulled over by three police cars, lights
flashing. The station attendant had called the police and claimed that he’d
been beaten and robbed.
“They had shotguns on us, dogs were barking, big old German shepherds,”
Staples told me. “They had us standing on the highway with our hands up
over our heads. Then they handcuffed us and one of them said, ‘This boy
here looks like he wants to run.’ They kept calling my father ‘boy.’ ”

In the trunk, the cops found a cigar box full of cash—more than a thousand
dollars—and a gun. The cash was from their earnings on the road, and the
pistol was legally registered. But the cops seemed convinced that this was
evidence of a felony.

The officers shoved the Staples family into the squad cars and brought them
to the local police station. “Pops walked in, hands cuffed behind his back,
and this Black man is there mopping the floor,” Staples recounted. “He said,
‘Papa Staples, what you doing here?’ And we laughed about that way later
—but we couldn’t laugh then.” The police captain, a white man named
Bobby Keen, thought he recognized Pops from television—the “Tonight
Show,” “Hootenanny,” he couldn’t remember which—and said, “My wife
loves you! Is that you?”

“Yes,” Pops said. “In person.”

“Get them handcuffs off them people,” Captain Keen told his officers.
Before heading back to the interstate, Pops autographed a few of their record
albums they kept in the trunk for Captain Keen.

Six weeks later, the Staple Singers were performing at the Mason Temple, in
Memphis, a major stop on the gospel highway. Mavis looked over to the
V.I.P. area, and there were Keen and some of his officers. Pops said, “Well,
Chief, it’s mighty nice of y’all to come out here to see us, but who’s minding
the town?”

Earlier this year, I went to see Staples and her band at the Barns, a small
indoor venue on the grounds of Wolf Trap, the performing-arts center in
Vienna, Virginia. The fans who lined up to show their immunization records
and take their seats were almost entirely white, and of a certain vintage.
That’s typical of Staples’s crowds these days. If I had to guess, I’d say that
most people at Wolf Trap first encountered the Staple Singers in “The Last
Waltz,” Martin Scorsese’s film of the Band’s final concert, an all-star
farewell held on Thanksgiving Day, 1976, at the Winterland Ballroom, in
San Francisco. The Band’s guests included Muddy Waters, Van Morrison,
Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan, and yet the Staples stole the movie, without
even appearing at the concert itself. They were touring in Europe. Weeks
later, Scorsese filmed them on an M-G-M soundstage playing “The Weight”
together with the Band. Gospel had been an essential spice in the Band’s
musical stew. “We worshipped the Staple Singers, plain and simple,” Levon
Helm, the Band’s drummer, told Greg Kot. “We tried to sing with the same
kind of delivery in our harmonies. They were who we looked to.” During a
break in the filming, Helm tried to pass a joint to Pops, but Pops demurred.
“Man, I don’t want none of that mess,” he said.

In the movie, Cleotha, Yvonne, and Pops are in good form, and Mavis is at
her best, giving “The Weight”—a surreal, country gallop—a spiritual lift.
After Helm takes the first verse, Mavis takes the second and brings the
whole affair to church. Pops sings the third verse in his sweet, whispery
tone, the narrative oozing out of him like a slow, thick stream of Bosco. But
it’s at the end, as everyone sings the verse and Mavis lags on the beat, with
her signature grunts and moans and claps, that your scalp tingles and you
think about the Staples, at their start, singing in their living room on the
South Side.

“Here’s my bar code—let’s keep in touch.”

Cartoon by Edward Koren
Dylan had heard that sound at a formative age. Growing up in the Iron
Range of Minnesota, he tuned in to the high-wattage radio stations from
Nashville and Memphis, Shreveport and Atlanta, that blanketed the country
each night with music that was far from the jukebox mainstream. “At
midnight, the gospel stuff would start,” Dylan later told a documentary
filmmaker. “I got to be acquainted with the Swan Silvertones and the Dixie
Hummingbirds, the Highway Q.C.’s and all that. But the Staple Singers
came on . . . and they were so different.” What shook him was the shivery
sound of “Sit Down Servant,” a spooky, almost medieval-seeming song that
Pops and his children had recorded in 1953. “Mavis was singing stuff like
‘Yonder come little David with a rock and sling, I don’t want to meet him,
he’s a dangerous man.’ . . . I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness!’ That made my hair
stand up. I thought, ‘That’s how the world is.’ ”

You can see black-and-white video of Staples singing that song in the early
sixties. Pops is dressed in a dark suit, the kids in dark choir gowns. Mavis, a
startlingly beautiful young woman, stands in the foreground. Her hands are
lifted, her expression glowing, and then comes that heavy voice, a great
rumbling from her deepest self: “I don’t want to meet him. . . . He’s a
daaayn-jus man!” And, from a hushed chant, the singing picks up volume
and pace, propelled by that warbly guitar, the slinky licks up the fretboard, a
cross-play of handclapping on the beat and after the beat, until Mavis
achieves a kind of scary, wheels-off propulsion:

God spoke to Joshua to do thy will

He said if you fight the battle, the sun’ll stand still
He give me a lantern and he told me to go
He give me a harp and he told me to blow

Something otherworldly is going on; the voices grow as swift and strange as
some kind of celestial railroad. If you were a kid listening to that song in the
dark, on the Iron Range or anywhere else, you, too, might hide under the
covers until daybreak.

Dylan arrived in New York in January, 1961, when he was nineteen. As he

was building a reputation on the folk scene in Greenwich Village, he ran into
the Staple Singers at a music festival in the city, and an acquaintance
introduced them. “Bob said, ‘I know the Staple Singers!’ ” Staples recalled.
“He said, ‘Pops, he has a velvety voice, but Mavis gets rough sometimes.’
And then he quoted that verse in ‘Sit Down Servant.’ ”

“I didn’t know no white boy knew our stuff!” Pops said.

As the sixties wore on, the Staple Singers broadened their repertoire. Pops,
who was in equal measure idealistic and shrewd, saw a growing appetite,
among white listeners as well as Black, for his message songs. He even had
the group record some of Dylan’s songs, including “Masters of War” and “A
Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Dylan developed what Staples calls a case of
“puppy love.” On a cafeteria line before a performance, Dylan turned to
Pops and said, “Pops, I want to marry Mavis.”

“Well, don’t you tell me, tell Mavis,” Pops said.

Staples delights in talking about it: “He was a cute little boy, little blue eyes,
curly hair. He and Pervis got to be tight. They’d sit out on the stoop, drink
wine.”

She describes their relationship as “courting,” with some “smooching” here

and there. But, when I asked if they almost got married, she smiled and said,
“Nobody almost gets married.

“I still have letters that we would write to each other. And the only time we
would see each other was when we happened to be on the same show.” She
went on, “I was the one that dodged a bullet. I wouldn’t have been able to
keep up with him.” But, she added, “if I stayed with him in his life, I don’t
think he would have turned to drugs like he did.”

Many years later, in 2016, Staples and her band toured as an opening act for
Dylan. As a matter of self-preservation, Dylan makes a habit of keeping to
himself on the road, rarely consorting with the opening act when he’s got
one. This time was different.

“The first show, someone knocked on my door and said someone wants to
see you,” she told me. “In comes Bobby. And I said, ‘Bobby, I’m so glad to
see you. I been wanting to see you for so long.’ ”
“You should have married me,” Dylan said. “You would’ve seen me every
day.”

Staples did marry once, and miserably. In 1964, she met a Chicago mortician
named Spencer Leak. The Leak family was prominent on the South Side,
and their wedding was a major social event. But Leak wasn’t happy about
his wife’s stardom, and it didn’t help that they could not have children, a
grave disappointment to Staples. The end came six years later, with Staples
changing the locks on her door and Leak sleeping in the funeral parlor. Her
next album, a solo effort, was called “Only for the Lonely.” Years later, she
told Prince about her marriage, inspiring him to write a song for her called
“The Undertaker.”

Staples is a canny retailer of her own story. She’s not going to get into a funk
over lost loves and ancient disappointments—not now, not in front of you or
me. Instead, she’ll tell you about when the Staple Singers went to Ghana,
and a bureaucrat showed up at her hotel door with a note from a Ghanaian
chief. “Chief Nana wanted me to be Wife No. 4,” she said. “We had all gone
to his palace one night. All this marble!” The chief, she said, was “good-
looking, but not good-looking enough for me to say, ‘Oh, yes, I’ll be Wife
No. 4.’ I mean, what’s Wife Nos. 2 and 3 gonna do? Probably tear me
apart.”

That ability to deflect, to find humor in complicated experience, indicates

not a lack of depth but a self-knowing soul. “I’m always struck by how
Mavis, no matter what she sings, no matter what the decade is, is always
leading you back to the sound of the church,” Braxton Shelley, a scholar of
music and the Black church at Yale, told me. “At the same time, Mavis
always seems like Mavis. She tells that terrible story about the gas station
and getting arrested, and she is talking about white supremacy, about painful
things. But, at the same time, you always sense that she has woven whatever
emotional pain she’s experienced into the fabric of her life. I don’t pretend to
deep knowledge of her inner life, but there is a deep sense of pleasantness
about Mavis Staples, which is a kind of miracle, you know?”
Roebuck Staples, the paterfamilias and bandleader, taught his children the blues-inflected gospel he’d absorbed growing up in Mississippi.Photograph by Gilles Petard / Redferns /
Getty

Because Staples is not eager to tell unhappy stories or engage in trash talk,
you’re taken aback in the rare moment when she heads into scratchy
territory—as when she discusses her relationship with Aretha Franklin.
Staples knew the Franklin family for much of her life. When she was a teen-
ager, Aretha’s father, C. L. Franklin, one of the country’s leading Black
preachers, came to Chicago from Detroit to deliver his famous sermon “The
Eagle Stirreth Her Nest.” “I ran all around and around the church,” Staples
told me. “The Holy Spirit had me.” It was, she said, like a “fire hitting you
from the bottom of your feet.”

She became good friends with Aretha Franklin and her siblings. There’s no
question that Franklin had a more powerful and versatile vocal instrument,
and Staples, despite her ability to put over a song with an uncommon depth
of feeling, has never pretended otherwise. But she always felt somewhat
diminished by Franklin, and, after they teamed up to record a live church
performance of Edwin Hawkins’s “Oh Happy Day,” in 1987, she felt
outright disrespected. When the recording was released, it became clear that
Franklin had turned down the volume on Staples’s vocal track. Staples said
she just shrugged and let it go. “I should’ve told her, ‘No, just don’t put the
record out,’ ” she said. “But you know me: goody-goody Mavis.”
Franklin, she admits, put her temperament to the test. “I put up with her for a
long time till I got tired, you know?” Staples told me. “She was very
insecure. I tried my best to be her friend. She would call me and ask me to
call her back. When I called her back, the number was changed. So, you
know, she was weird like that.”

Still, Staples said, “I’m just a happy-go-lucky, you know? I can get over
anything.” Except deaths in the family. Through the years, Pops and Mavis
were the constants in the Staple Singers. Yvonne, Pervis, and Cleotha moved
in and out of the group; Oceola stayed home. The one sibling who never
performed was Cynthia, the youngest. Cynthia suffered from depression.
Kids had bullied her in school and pestered her, asking why she wasn’t
singing with her famous family. Sometimes, when Mavis was in Chicago,
she let Cynthia come stay with her and tried to cheer her up. “I pushed Pops
to have Cynthia play tambourine or something for us,” Staples said, but that
never worked out.

One day in 1973, when Cynthia was twenty-one, she was at home with
Oceola, who was in the kitchen making supper. The rest of the family was
on the road, performing in Las Vegas. Cynthia mentioned to Oceola that
she’d received a check in the mail from Pops and wanted to write a thank-
you note. Instead, she went into the living room and shot herself with a .38-
calibre revolver. “We just never knew how bad she was suffering,” Staples
said.

Backstage at Wolf Trap, Staples and her band prepared for the show as they
often do, by singing a gospel tune, “Wonderful Savior.” Sometimes,
particularly in the South, Staples might get a crowd that is racially mixed,
but not often. It’s been a long time since she could measure her performance
by the number of shouts and “amen”s from an audience; no one at Wolf Trap
was likely to require a deacon to fan them back into consciousness. Those
gospel theatrics and emotions belong to a different world. And modern
gospel—whether it is Kirk Franklin’s hip-hop-inflected music or the vast
number of choirs in churches across the country or Kanye West’s Sunday
Service Choir—is not a presence for most of these listeners. All the same,
Staples will sometimes have her guitar player, Rick Holmstrom, sneak a
look at the audience. “I can sense a difference in her when we get an amen
corner with even some pockets of African Americans—it changes the vibe,”
he told me. “I’ll peek, and she’ll say, ‘How does it look? Slim and his
brother None?’ I’ll say, ‘I don’t think it’s a “Weight” night.’ That means
there’s some Black folks. We can lean on soul and gospel. A ‘Weight’ night
would be when it’s a white crowd.”

The Staple Singers, like their leading Black brethren in the blues, have
always had a reverent audience of white musicians. One of the first singles
the Rolling Stones recorded was “The Last Time,” a hit in 1965, which is
credited to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards but was inspired by a Staples
recording from a decade before. Pops Staples didn’t mind; the tune is from a
traditional gospel song. Then the Stones’ management asked the Staple
Singers to open for them on their 1972 tour. By now, Pops had shifted the
group into more popular material. Singles like “I’ll Take You There” might
have displeased some gospel purists, but they widened the group’s appeal
and made them wealthy. No matter. The Stones offered the Staple Singers a
paltry five hundred dollars a night. Pops turned them down. “I’d like to think
Mick Jagger doesn’t know about this,” he told a reporter for Variety.

Mavis Staples has no patience for segregation, in politics or in music. She is

at once sure-minded about the essential place of Black composers and
performers in American music and open to singing with anyone who can
keep up. Over and over in recent years, she has been a presence in that
gumbo genre known as Americana. Among her albums in that vein is a
sentimental one called “You Are Not Alone,” recordings that she did in 2011
with Levon Helm, at his barn in Woodstock. Helm, who died in 2012, was
suffering from throat cancer; he was terribly thin, his voice raspy and weak,
and yet together they rise to the occasion, collaborating on Curtis Mayfield’s
protest anthem “This Is My Country,” Dylan’s gospel song “Gotta Serve
Somebody,” “The Weight,” and, yes, “This May Be the Last Time.”

Onstage at Wolf Trap, Staples was energetic. She put together a set that
mixed Staple Singers hits (“If You’re Ready,” “I’ll Take You There”), a
Delta blues (Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “You Got to Move”), and covers
of songs by Talking Heads, Buffalo Springfield, and Funkadelic. She also
did a ribald version of “Let’s Do It Again,” a song that Curtis Mayfield had
to talk Pops into performing. “I’m a church man, I’m not singing that,” Pops
had protested. “Oh, Pops, the Lord won’t mind,” Mayfield said. “It’s just a
love song.” Commerce prevailed. Besides, how many hours are there, really,
between Saturday night and Sunday morning? As if to deepen the sin,
Staples got into a kind of squatting, hip-bumping thing with Holmstrom,
and, at one point, he even used the head of his guitar to lift her skirt.
Afterward, she scolded him, laughing, “Rick, you took that sin song too
serious! You can’t be doing that!”

For the most part, the band stands back and lets Staples sing, giving her the
space to move within the song and have her way with it. Holmstrom said,
“Pops would tell her, ‘Sing it plain. Put it out there.’ She was once
screaming a little, getting a little too much, and Pops said, ‘Just stand there
and sing it nice and plain and you’ll get your point across.’ ” These days, she
finishes her set with “I’ll Take You There.” She has performed that song as
often as Dylan has performed “Like a Rolling Stone,” but she does it with
such lightness and conviction that, as the audience sings along, you get the
sense that she wouldn’t mind singing all the night through. At the end,
Holmstrom touches her gently on the elbow and leads her into the wings.

When we talked later, Staples returned, as always, to the weight that bears
down on her: the loneliness she feels when she is not singing, all the missing
—Oceola, Cynthia, Pervis, Cleotha, Pops, Yvonne. I asked her if she thinks
about the end.

“You know, I do,” she said. “I do quite often. And I wonder how I’m going
to go. Where will I be? I’ve prepared everything. I have a will—because I
have a lot of nieces and nephews, Pervis’s children, and charities. But I seem
to think about that more now than ever. And I tell myself, ‘I gotta stop
thinking.’ Speedy, he tells me maybe I should talk to a therapist. I said,
‘Don’t need no therapist. The Lord is my therapist. That’s who I talk to
when I need help.’ ”

I asked her if she gets an answer.

“Yes, indeed. That’s why I’m still here. He lets me know when I’m right and
when I’m wrong, but he ain’t letting me know about when my time is
coming. But, see, I just have to be ready. If it comes tomorrow, I’m ready. I
have done all that I’m supposed to do. I’ve been good. I’ve kept my father’s
legacy alive. Pops started this, and I’m not just going to squander it. I’m
going to sing every time I get on the stage—I’m gonna sing with all my
heart and all I can put out.” ♦
Shouts & Murmurs

Missed Connections at the Capitol

By Mike O’Brien

Craigslist, Washington, D.C.

Funky orange cap

I saw you walking from the speech to the Capitol. You were wearing a
tactical vest and funky little orange cap. You were screaming something
about being a patriot. Our eyes met, and we spoke briefly and realized we
were both interested in travel and in scary movies. You were really out of
breath. I helped you get a Marlboro wrapper out of your beard. You
mentioned multiple times that you like feet and wanted me to know that you
rank feet above even travel and scary movies. Wish I’d asked for your
number to chat more.

Cuter Bo Burnham
You looked like Bo Burnham but cuter and with more of a beard. You were
wearing a Colonial-guy uniform and climbing onto a statue of Gerald Ford
when our eyes met. I asked if I could climb onto the statue with you and you
said no. That made me smile. We talked/shouted a little. You mentioned that
you owned two chameleons and that you were in the market for a third. I
said I’d keep an ear out. Would love 2 get coffee☺

Art lover
You were trying to pry a painting off the wall using a shard of glass. You had
a beard. I’d been separated from my husband in the crowd and ended up
shouting with you a little bit. You yelled “Best of all time” in my face. I
think I said, “O.K., sounds good,” but it may have been lost in the noise. I
had on khaki pants. Want to talk more or have coffee?

Mystery man with tucked-in shirt

You were wearing a blue shirt that was intensely tucked into your jeans. Our
eyes locked while you were setting up a gallows. Don’t know if u remember
me. I’m shy AF and was wearing a gas mask with a steamed-up visor, so
maybe you didn’t even notice the eye contact, LOL. If you felt what I felt,
hit my mailbox ASAP. I’m dying literally I’m sick LOL real.

Military man looking for bathroom

You were an older guy, sixties. I’m in my fifties. You were cute and wearing
a vaguely military uniform and holding a huge flag, but I could tell you were
not really in the military and never had been. Granted, I’m just a Bulgarian
cleaning woman, but I can tell when someone is really in the military or
knows what it’s like to have been in the military. Any military. Like, even
the worst one ever wouldn’t have its uniform look like that. Anyway, we
made eye contact and you screamed in my face that you needed to find a
bathroom or I’d be working overtime mopping the Capitol floor, and I
pointed you toward the men’s room. But then you hesitated like you were
going to say something else—I want to know what you were going to say. I
think I thought it, too.

Cute aide
You were crawling over me on the floor of the gallery when our eyes met.
You were wearing a cute blue suit and an employee badge. We bonded about
both wanting to get out of there. You also mentioned liking the band Arcade
Fire. I didn’t say anything, which you took to mean that I didn’t like Arcade
Fire, but really I’d been distracted by the sound of glass shattering. You then
spoke at length about how you don’t like Arcade Fire that much. Actually, I
like Arcade Fire fine. Would like to get coffee. I’m a senator.

Smile or strain
You were the only girl I saw all day. I was told that this would be a place to
meet ladies, but that was certainly not the case, ha. You were wearing two
camouflage jackets. One on top of the other, ha. We made eye contact while
you were taking a dump in the rotunda. Couldn’t tell if you were smiling or
straining, but I hope smiling! ’Cause I thought you were cute. Let me know
which it was. Would like to go for coffee if was smiling. ♦
Sketchbook

Delegates to the World’s Only Truly Universal Global

Organization
By Edward Steed
Tables for Two

Making Magic, at Place des Fêtes

By Hannah Goldfield

On the cusp of the summer solstice, it’s hard to imagine looking forward to
colder, darker months. And yet the other night at Place des Fêtes, a new
wine bar and restaurant in Clinton Hill, the idea consoled me. A few weeks
prior, I’d had a dish there that I was ready to declare the best of 2022. A
skate wing had been quick-cured, cold-smoked, breaded in whipped egg
whites and koji-rice flour, and deep-fried twice. The darkly bronzed exterior,
dusted in dried lacto-fermented red pepper, looked tough but cracked easily
at the nudge of a fork, peeling cleanly along the bone and revealing strips of
sweet, succulent meat. Surrounding it were a wedge of Meyer lemon, a
delicate pile of dill and Italian parsley, a tiny dish of sauce gribiche (mayo,
boiled egg, Calabrian chili, pickled green garlic, bottarga, lemon), and, best
of all, a warm buckwheat crêpe folded as elegantly as a pocket square and
releasing the heavenly scent of toasted nuts. I was thrilled by the prospect of
eating it again. My heart sank to see it absent from the menu. “The water’s
getting warmer,” my server explained; the skate was sourced from
Massachusetts.

While we wait for the water to cool (as long as climate change allows), there
is plenty else to love here, and a sense that the kitchen—overseen by the
chef and co-owner Nico Russell, known previously for Oxalis, in Crown
Heights—can make magic with whatever the season, or the pantry, presents.
Fingerling potatoes, grilled low and slow until their skins turned thick and
crisp and separated from their velvety flesh, smacked of a campfire, except
for a luscious green gloss of savory sabayon, a light custard usually served
for dessert, made with ramps and skin-contact wine instead of the customary
sweet Marsala. Spruce needles clung to dense wedges of refreshing Japanese
cucumber. Segments of royal-red shrimp, as scarlet-tinged as their name
suggests, were arranged like polka dots in a pool of salt-macerated
gooseberries, each wearing a ring of knotweed, an invasive plant with
crunchy hollow stems and a tart, rhubarb-like flavor.

A plate of four skinny Don Bocarte anchovy fillets in olive oil, imported
from Spain, seemed so austere that I felt compelled to order bread (sourced
from the nearby Otway Bakery) to compensate. But the anchovies were
beguilingly unctuous, almost creamy, with a complex but subtle flavor that
the excellent miche—made with malted rye, dense and dark—threatened to
overpower.

The vibe at Place des Fêtes is festive but subdued, a perfect place for a first date.

Both anchovies and bread appear on a section of the menu entitled

“salé/salted,” which also offers cheeses and charcuterie, including a silky
mortadella made by Tempesta, a salumi company in Chicago, and a funky
aged country ham from Kentucky. All of these are treated with no less care
for their unadorned simplicity; the other night, I watched as a chef brought a
plate of ham to room temperature under a heat lamp, which spotlighted his
cleaver tattoo.

Place des Fêtes, the name of a plaza in the Nineteenth Arrondissement of

Paris, translates to “party square.” Place des Fêtes in Brooklyn, with its
buttery leather stools and whitewashed brick walls, would be perfect for a
first date. Bottles of wine, mostly Spanish, are kept in a festively enormous
silver bucket full of ice at the end of the bar, but they encourage
conversation more than revelry: a pét-nat from Castilla y León, for instance,
smelled startlingly herbal and tasted of blood orange.

Even the cocktails make you think. The excellent house Martini, cold and
smoothly viscous, is made with tomato liqueur, sherry, vermouth, and a local
carbon-negative vodka called Good that’s distilled from discarded coffee
fruit. And my favorite was the lowest A.B.V., the Vermut and Soda, which
features a vermouth from the Basque country and which the bartender
accurately described as “almost like a Dr. Pepper,” though it’s not nearly as
sweet, and imparts the barest impression of smoke. (Dishes $8-$35.) ♦
The Current Cinema

How “Elvis” Plays the King

By Anthony Lane

Last year was not great for Elvis Presley. According to Forbes, which tallies
up the take-home pay of the dead, he made a mere thirty million dollars in
2021—more than Arnold Palmer, it’s true, but less than Bing Crosby and Dr.
Seuss. Elvis can rest easy, though. This year, his income could see a healthy
spike, thanks to the latest Baz Luhrmann film, “Elvis,” which features
Austin Butler in the title role. Presleyologists will learn nothing here, and
purists will find plenty against which to rail. Less knowing viewers,
however, may well be sucked in by Luhrmann’s lively telling of the tale.
This is not a movie for suspicious minds.

Any fan of musical bio-pics will be familiar with the form: a hop, a skip, and
a jump from one highlight to the next. (Some of the highs, needless to say,
are lows.) In the case of Elvis, this means that we meet him in his youth—
played by the striking Chaydon Jay, the rare intensity of whose gaze really
does set the kid apart. Hurrying onward, we get a pit stop of Elvis as a truck
driver, with his guitar swung up over his shoulder like a rifle; the cyclonic
sight of Elvis onstage, pretty in pink, and whipping a crowd into a Dionysian
froth; Elvis on the Steve Allen show, in white tie and tails, singing “Hound
Dog” to a gloomy pooch; Elvis escaping to Beale Street, in Memphis, to
hang out with B. B. King (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) and to revel in Little Richard
(Alton Mason); Elvis in Army uniform, looking impossibly spiffy and
pitching his woo to Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge), the daughter of a captain;
Elvis lamenting the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy;
Elvis lounging inside a vowel on the Hollywood sign, and being told that his
career is “in the toilet”; Elvis performing in residence at the International
Hotel, in Las Vegas, flush with renewed success; and Elvis sitting sadly in a
limousine, beside a private jet, and saying to Priscilla, “I’m gonna be forty
soon, ’Cilla. Forty.” Has the prospect of age never occurred to him until
now? Two years later, he is gone, though the movie spares us the unlovely
particulars of his end.

Guiding us through this strange saga, in which the most private moments
feel like public property, is Colonel Tom Parker. As has long been
established, he was not a proper colonel, or a Parker, or even a Tom. He was
a Dutchman, Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, who went to America and erected
a new identity for himself, as breezily as someone putting up a big top. He
became Elvis’s manager, magus, m.c., and (many would argue) terminator.
Were Kevin Spacey not otherwise engaged, he’d be a natural fit for the part.
Instead, it goes to Tom Hanks, with a sharpened nose, a shiny pate, and a
cladding of false fat. For dedicated Hanksians like me, these are confusing
times; compare the trailer for Disney’s upcoming “Pinocchio,” in which
Hanks—Einstein wig, a hedge of mustache, and, I suspect, yet another nose
—assumes the role of Geppetto. At present, for whatever reason, this most
trusted of actors has chosen to seek cover in camouflage and to specialize in
the pulling of strings, whether wicked or benign. As Parker says, in one of
many voice-overs, “I didn’t kill him. I made Elvis Presley.” It’s a real boy!

How do you wish yourself upon a star? Simple. Parker takes Elvis on a
Ferris wheel, stops at the top of the ride, and, like the Devil, sheweth him all
the kingdoms of the world. “Are you ready to fly?” Parker asks. There is
nothing subtle about the staging of such scenes, but then Luhrmann, as was
evident in “Moulin Rouge!” (2001), makes a proud virtue of unsubtlety.
Little is left unspoken or half concealed. Young Elvis, for instance, peering
through a crack in a shack, spies a couple of dancers, writhing and
perspiring to the lusty wail of the blues; he then runs to a nearby tent, sneaks
inside, and enters a Black revivalist meeting, which gives him the
Pentecostal shakes. The proximity of the two locations is frankly ludicrous,
but it allows Luhrmann to hammer home his point: the Presley sound was
forged in a double ardor, sacred and profane. You don’t say.

As with every chronicle, there are gaps where you least expect them. Thus,
any Elvis addict is steeped in the lore of July, 1954—the late session at Sun
Studio, in Memphis, when Elvis, together with Scotty Moore, on lead guitar,
and Bill Black, on bass, was about to call it a night, dissatisfied with what
they’d done so far. For a lark, they began messing around with an old
number called “That’s All Right, Mama,” taking it at a driven but drumless
lick. The producer, Sam Phillips, roused to action by what he was hearing,
told them to start again. As earthquakes go, it was all the more potent for
being so comically casual, and it cries out to be dramatized; imagine what
Robert Altman or Jonathan Demme might have done with such a scene. But
Luhrmann gives it barely a glance. He prefers spectacular set pieces,
stretched out instead of whittled down. Hence the space that he grants to the
famous comeback concert of 1968, with Elvis resplendent in black leather,
and, later, to a large slab of Vegas-era pomp, with Elvis all aglow in studded
white, like a naughty angel on the loose. The curious thing is that both
events already exist as visual records. The first was a TV production, the
most popular broadcast of the season, and the second was enshrined in a
1970 documentary, “Elvis: That’s the Way It Is.” Both can be streamed
whenever you please. Luhrmann may be kicking up a storm, but the thunder
is nothing new.

Grab a bathroom break in the middle of “Elvis” and you could easily miss
the speediest part of the film. This is a montage devoted to Elvis’s least
purple patch, in which he headed west, at Parker’s urging, to be a movie star.
The result included such immortal works as “Girls! Girls! Girls!” (1962) and
“Clambake” (1967), and “Elvis” duly supplies its hero with a leading man’s
lament. “I’m so tired of playing Elvis Presley,” he says. My guess is that
Luhrmann, like other admirers, is so embarrassed by the sight of such
doldrums that he wants to get ’em over with and sail on. Is he right?

Not entirely. Not if you follow the money. To ignore Elvis as a commercial
machine, in his earning power as in his fabled spending, is to clean up the
myth of the man, and to parse the box-office returns for 1961, noting that
Elvis’s “Blue Hawaii” made more than “Judgment at Nuremberg” (and,
indeed, more than “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”), is to inch your way into the
America of the time. The Mississippi Midas, who grew up as a mother-
loving only child, of lowly stock, had somehow wound up here, crooning to
his ukulele; it was a miracle of transfiguration, and who wouldn’t buy into
that? Elvis’s movies are, among other things, a showcase of his manners,
and that eager courtesy, too, is a selling point. Of the blazing affair that he
had with Ann-Margret, when they made “Viva Las Vegas” (1964), all that
survives in the film are sparks of merriment. He is flattened rather than
deepened by the range of his paper-thin roles—cowboy, racecar driver,
frogman, pilot, or, in “Tickle Me” (1965), a rodeo rider at an all-female
ranch—and he appears to be physically airbrushed by the sheen of the
screen. That is why Andy Warhol based a series of silvery prints on a still
from “Flaming Star,” a 1960 Western, in which Elvis is posed as a
gunslinger. His revolver is aimed toward us, and, if it’s loaded, it’s full of
blanks.

All of which, to those who sensed the explosive charge of the earlier Elvis,
is a travesty, a tragedy, and a kind of creative death. Greil Marcus, in his
majestic essay “Elvis: Presliad,” refers to “the all-but-complete assimilation
of a revolutionary musical style into the mainstream of American culture,
where no one is challenged and no one is threatened.” The question is
whether Luhrmann’s “Elvis” feeds that continuing process of absorption or
strives to hold out against it. The film certainly looks provocative enough,
with the camera refusing to sit still, the credits dripping with bling, and the
Ferris wheel dissolving into the spinning label of a 45. Now and then,
Luhrmann cheerfully slices up the frame like someone making a banana
split. But aesthetic mischief, however hyperactive, is not the same as risk,
and, given how the movie shies away from sex and drugs (we see a rattling
handful of pills, hardly the pharmaceutical candy store of legend), what hope
is there for rock and roll?

Well, there are flickers of danger in Austin Butler’s Elvis, as he advances to

the brink of the stage, at a Memphis ballpark, and stokes the hysteria of the
throng. (Parker is so alarmed that he summons the cops.) For the most part,
though, what Butler brings out is the charm of the character, with his
Hawaii-blue eyes, and his compliant lightness of heart. I didn’t quite believe
in the tears that he sheds after his mother dies; on the other hand, the ease
with which he embarks on rehearsals at the International Hotel, making nice
to his thirty-piece band and to his backing singers, the Sweet Inspirations,
rings joyfully true. He tickles us, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

In short, on the spectrum of those who have sought to incarnate Elvis, Butler
belongs at the tender end—far from Kurt Russell, with his tough hide, in
John Carpenter’s “Elvis” (1979), or from Nicolas Cage, who teams up with a
club of skydiving Elvis look-alikes in “Honeymoon in Vegas” (1992), and
whose whole career has been like a set of variations on the theme of Elvis.
(For good measure, Cage also married Lisa Marie, Elvis’s daughter, though
not for long.) But let’s face it: the first and the best Elvis impersonator was
Elvis himself, and everybody who has played him since, on film and
elsewhere, has just added another layer to the palimpsest, and thus to the
meaning of the man. There is no ur-Elvis hiding below. We dream of being
those folks who tuned in to Dewey Phillips’s slot on WHBQ, in July, 1954,
and heard the King sing for the first time, and felt the ground shift beneath
our feet; but we can never go back. That’s the way it is. ♦
The Theatre

Harmonic Lightscapes in Two Furtively Spiritual Plays

By Vinson Cunningham

Great lighting onstage has an unplaceable emotional effect. You feel it in its
swelling or ebbing before you get a chance to think. Sometimes light’s
power is totally belated: I realize how much certain arrangements of
exposure and shadow have touched me only when, days later, I recover them
in memory. One artist whose lightscapes tend to linger in my mind is
Isabella Byrd, the designer whose work illuminates two furtively spiritual
new plays: “Corsicana,” by Will Arbery, and “Epiphany,” by Brian Watkins.

In terms of their structure and their pacing—and, therefore, the demands

they heap upon a sensitive lighting designer—these plays feel almost like
opposites. “Corsicana” moves fleetly between its many scenes, with minimal
set changes, and “Epiphany” unfolds with a slow, haunting mystery across
one long, overstuffed scene. But Byrd’s lighting, exerting a strong but
delicate harmonic influence, like that of the double-bass in an orchestra,
made the pieces cohere for me, forming a suite on the themes of the terror of
love and the agonies of belief.

Byrd has worked with Arbery before, creating a dramatic, painterly palette
for his play “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” from 2019, which was a finalist
for the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The characters in “Heroes” are young
conscience-tortured Catholic conservatives, and Byrd lit them with
commensurate tension, using chiaroscuro to emphasize the stubborn
doubleness of their emotional and intellectual lives. The characters in
“Corsicana”—which is produced, as was “Heroes,” at Playwrights Horizons,
under the direction of Sam Gold—are less florid in personality but equally
searching, using conversational volleys and long, shambling monologues as
vehicles of uncertain, sometimes muddled, self-disclosure.

Ginny (Jamie Brewer) is a thirty-four-year-old woman with Down

syndrome. Her mother has recently died, and now she lives with her younger
half brother, Christopher (Will Dagger). Ginny is funny and earnest, equally
insistent on her interests (the pop stylings of Shawn Mendes and Selena
Gomez; the simple pleasure of a cold Sprite) and her pet peeves (hearing the
Lord’s name taken in vain; being told what to do). She loves Christopher,
even though she thinks of him—quite rightly—as a stunted adult, too “lazy”
and self-indulgent for his own good. Both siblings, in their mourning, are
inarticulately angry and unsure how to help each other cope. “I need to do
something,” Ginny says early in the play, identifying her ennui without a
sense of how to salve it. “I’m worried. I can’t find my heart.”

Arbery writes the dialogue between Ginny and Christopher, however ringed
by sadness, with a sweet, intimate ease. Even moments of consternation feel
amiable and well worn:

CHRISTOPHER: You think I’m lazy?

GINNY: Just a little bit.

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah we’re just . . . Okay. We need to—we’re just,

like, little kids. We don’t know what to do. Like we’re waiting for her
to come in and just be like, let’s eat, let’s go to church, let’s . . . but
we’re just little kids.

GINNY: No, we’re adults.

CHRISTOPHER: You’re right.

GINNY: I’m 34 years old and you’re 33 years old.

CHRISTOPHER: You’re right.

GINNY: So we have to be adults.

“Corsicana” has autobiographical import for Arbery. “I wrote this play

because I have an older sister named Julia who has Down syndrome,” he
says in his program note. “I’ve always wanted to create a play about what
it’s like to be her brother. So I started writing this play which I’ve been
writing all my life.” It makes sense, then, that Byrd uses little of the
brinkmanship that was on display in “Heroes.” Instead, she opts for a bright,
soft, natural-looking white light, often flooding the set at a sharp angle from
opposite corners of the stage, spotlighting Ginny and Christopher with the
gauzy ambiguity of memory. Bouquets of other colors—purples and pinks—
appear only when the pair watches TV and the glow is reflected on their
faces.
This frank, poetic visual approach works especially well when the actors
take flight on their artfully awkward monologues, full of hesitations and
repetitions. Brewer is especially precise and keen as Ginny. She has a clear,
high voice and speaks in riverine, lyrical phrases. Ginny is often interrupted
by the other characters—she knows that their constant interjections of “I
know” and “Right” spring from their perceptions of her condition—but
Brewer turns the interruptions into opportunities for unlikely rhythm. When
Justice (the great Deirdre O’Connell), a close family friend, keeps butting in,
Ginny says, “Just listen to me.” And the rest of her aria—“I do have a body
as a woman,” she insists. “And desire as a woman”—is set aloft by lighting
that looks like a glow from within. Ginny grows, all desire, before our eyes.

Justice was the best friend of Christopher and Ginny’s mom, and now she’s
friends with Lot (Harold Surratt), who makes sculptures out of trash and has
recently—and, we quickly understand, reluctantly—been profiled by the
glossy Southern quarterly Oxford American. That background makes for a
neat parody of the outsider-artist trope, but Lot is a true outsider in
Corsicana, Texas, in more ways than one. First of all, he’s Black. And,
unlike Ginny, who says with forthright self-acceptance that her heart is “like
this dream-wish about things,” he’s touchy about being labelled with an
unnamed neurodivergence. At Justice’s urging, Christopher hires Lot—who
is also a musician—to help Ginny write a song. It’s a thin strand of plot in a
play that doesn’t really want narrative encumbrances, and sometimes bucks
against them, but that does want all these fitful souls to congregate and trade
hopes and, ultimately, sing.

Lot’s work is a “one way street to God,” he says. He’s got no interest in
money or worldly success. He bristles at the outer world thinking of people
like him and Ginny as “simple”—no, their lives are shot through with strong
yearnings, deep and knowable, as undeniable but ungraspable as the light
that kindles their eyes.

One constant worry during Brian Watkins’s “Epiphany”—directed by Tyne

Rafaeli, at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre—is that the lights
will go off for good, leaving the actors and the audience members in the
stark darkness of a power outage. Morkan (Marylouise Burke), a scattered
older woman with a slapstick sense of timing, is throwing a dinner party in
January for Epiphany, a holiday whose origins she doesn’t know—and
neither do all but one of her guests—but whose abstract meaning gets her
thinking about togetherness among friends. She lives in the country, and the
weather is vicious (the set designer, John Lee Beatty, never lets the audience
lose sight of the snow), and the lights keep flickering.

You might think of those signs of oncoming electrical doom as angelic

reminders to Morkan’s mostly secular guests that the holiday—Epiphany is
the traditional ending of the Christmas season, celebrating the discovery of
the baby Jesus by the three wise men, who navigated their way to the
Messiah by way of the stars—is a feast in commemoration of light, celestial
and spiritual. “Epiphany” is, at least in part, a meditation on the unravelling
that happens in a hyper-busy, post-ritualistic culture. Nobody can really
relax into the party. When Morkan insists on confiscating smartphones, her
guests freak out.

The moral streak in the play occasionally edges into moralizing and
didacticism, but Watkins creates an atmosphere of real portent. Byrd
emphasizes a warm, indoor yellow light, doubling down on Morkan’s
candles, which are lit over the course of the evening.

Rafaeli manages the big ensemble cast—Burke, Francois Battiste, Heather

Burns, the stunningly good Jonathan Hadary, Omar Metwally, Colby
Minifie, David Ryan Smith, C. J. Wilson, and Carmen Zilles, whose voice
cuts a bright, tangy swath across the air in the theatre—with wit and fluidity.
Most moving, though, is how Byrd creates a darkening tableau of the end of
the night, full of gathering shadows, as the guests dwindle and time slips by.
Light in the hearth, however merry, is just like the light outdoors—you’d
better take a mental picture while it lasts. After its glory, it goes. ♦
 Table of Contents
NewYorker.2022.07.04
Annals of Nature
Swamps Can Protect Against Climate Change, If We Only
Let Them
App推荐-英阅阅读器
安利一个英语专用阅读器
Art
An Exploration of Chinese Identity, at Asia Society
Books
Briefly Noted
Modern Art and the Esteem Machine
Comment
We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe. We’re Going
Somewhere Worse
Crossword
The Crossword: Thursday, June 23, 2022
Curation Dept.
A Reporter in Right-Wing “Crazy Town”
Fiction
“To Sunland”
In Miniature
How to Split Custody of a One-Inch-Tall Talking Shell
Letter from Budapest
Does Hungary Offer a Glimpse of Our Authoritarian Future?
Musical Events
Anything Goes at the Ojai Festival
Onward and Upward with the Arts
The Weird, Analog Delights of Foley Sound Effects
Poems
“Fracture Story”
“The Bread, the Butter, the Orange Marmalade”
Profiles
The Gospel According to Mavis Staples
Shouts & Murmurs
 Missed Connections at the Capitol
Sketchbook
Delegates to the World’s Only Truly Universal Global
Organization
Tables for Two
Making Magic, at Place des Fêtes
The Current Cinema
How “Elvis” Plays the King
The Theatre
Harmonic Lightscapes in Two Furtively Spiritual Plays