December 6, 2016 Our Correspondents Long Live Paul By Elena Passarello Elena Passarello’s column is about famous animals from history. Design by Kristen Radtke. Your tentacles are magical They pick the winning team! … You pick the winner When you eat your dinner! Paul the Octopus, we love you! —From “Paul the Octopus” by Parry Gripp Those who believe in this type of thing cannot be the leaders of the global nations that aspire, like Iran, to human perfection. –Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “It’s only an octopus.” —Carlos Marchena, central defender for Spain Read More
December 2, 2016 Our Correspondents Notes on Camp By Megan Mayhew Bergman Using Susan Sontag to consider the American devotion to lawn culture. Peter Alfred Hess, untitled, watercolor on cold press Arches paper, 30″ x 22″. Enjoy Nature! I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that faculty … My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. —Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying This year’s growing season was longer than expected, and gave my family tomatoes, copious greens, pale peonies, and Russian sage that grew with a fury, reaching over the beds, shaking a flush of tiny purple blossoms onto the paths. I was too busy to tend these plants and edibles in spring, so they bloomed into something wild and tangled, potentially man-eating. Only when there were novel edits to make or difficult phone conversations to endure did I go to the garden to weed on my knees, bare-handed, desperate for the distraction of physical labor. Working with one’s hands feels meditative and purposeful when the mind is overheated. It is therefore not unusual to find a connection between writer and gardener; we have more need than most to find balance between what Hannah Arendt called the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. Emily Dickinson claimed she was “reared in the garden.” Virginia Woolf warned friends that her expansive garden at her country home, Monk’s House, was “the pride of our hearts.” In a 1911 letter, Edith Wharton claimed she was “a better landscape gardener than novelist, and this place, every line of which is my own work, far surpasses The House of Mirth.” Read More
December 1, 2016 Our Correspondents In Comparison By Wei Tchou Asking Ma about life in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution. My mother and I were decorating the Christmas tree during a quiet afternoon last week when I thought to ask her if the sorrow I have been inclined toward postelection is anything like what she experienced during the Cultural Revolution, when she was a teenager. I had flown home to Georgia for Thanksgiving feeling exhausted and emotionally volatile—still trapped in what felt and continues to feel like grief. “Some of it seems familiar,” she said, “but no, it’s nothing in comparison.” I asked her what felt the same, as I scooped up a handful of ornaments. Our collection neatly comprises my family’s entire United States’ life: here are a few mice knitted by my grandmother when my parents first arrived in America; a sand dollar tied with a red ribbon from the first church they joined in Kentucky; a bell cut from orange construction paper with a photograph of my pudgy face pasted on it, from 1991. Read More
November 30, 2016 Our Correspondents On Swift By Anthony Madrid William Powell Frith, Jonathan Swift and Vanessa, 1881. Jonathan Swift is 349 years old today. Which is to say he’s beginning his 350th year. What was he anyway? Or never mind what he was; what did he think he was? Did he think he was mainly the author of Gulliver’s Travels—? Did he think he was a journalist? Deep down, did he consider himself mainly a “Church of England man”? Maybe. I don’t believe he would have said, I am a satirist. I don’t think he thought that was a job. Or a life. Perhaps he mainly thought he was the cat who walks through the Wet Wild Woods, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone. Heaven knows that’s what I think, but I want to know what he thought. We know what Thomas Jefferson thought Thomas Jefferson was. He designed his own grave marker and spelled everything out: Read More
November 25, 2016 Our Correspondents Setting Boundaries By Amy Gentry Sleeping with the Enemy cozies right up to the hard truth that abusers are everywhere. A still from Sleeping with the Enemy. Every domestic thriller is the sequel to a romantic comedy. Romantic comedies reward impulsive, boundary-smashing gestures and unflagging perseverance; thrillers check in on the kinds of couples created by such careless disregard for personal space. With just a little tweaking, it’s easy to imagine Julia Roberts’s abusive millionaire husband in 1991’s Sleeping with the Enemy as the same character played by Richard Gere in Pretty Woman a year earlier, climbing toward Roberts up the fire escape, a bouquet of roses clenched in his teeth. Pretty Woman did for romantic comedies what Fatal Attraction did for domestic thrillers, and it made a star of Roberts; her way of, as Janet Maslin put it, “smiling shyly with every particle of her being” spun the most cynical meet-cute of the nineties into something as fresh and naive as a Downy ad. Sleeping with the Enemy, a grim and purposeful little film, positively warps around her radiant vulnerability. Directed by Joseph Ruben from a much flimsier script than his 1987 domestic horror film The Stepfather, Sleeping with the Enemy opens on Laura Burney (Roberts) and her aforementioned rich, violent husband Martin (Patrick Bergin) in their chilly modernist vacation home in Cape Cod. Laura fakes her death to escape his brutal beatings and coercive intimacy, starting a new life under an alias in small-town Iowa; Martin discovers the fraud and tracks her down to the inevitable confrontation. Read More
November 23, 2016 Our Correspondents Zonies, Part 1: Flora By Mike Powell Mike Powell is the Daily’s newest correspondent. His column is about living in Arizona. Ryan Schneider, It’s All Around You (detail), 2016, oil on canvas, 24″ x 20″. Courtesy the artist and Taymour Grahne Gallery. Shortly after my wife and I bought our house in Tucson, I noticed a strange growth on a paddle cactus in the yard. It was puffy and white and looked a little like wet mold. “A fungus,” one landscaper told me, adding that it would be expensive to get rid of. Something about the generic phrase “a fungus” gave me pause. A man paid to understand plants should know more proper nouns. One man’s fungus turns out to be another man’s cocoon for a small parasite called the cochineal, which burrows into cactus pads and, in great numbers and slow speeds, kills them. To the naked eye, male cochineal look like tiny ants, while females, which hang sessile in their cocoons, look like fat gray worms about half the length of my pinky nail. Read More