April 26, 2017 Our Correspondents Survivor By Jane Stern A hypochondriac’s guide to rare diseases. I recently made a wrong turn out of the parking lot of the Danbury Fair Mall, where I’d indulged in a bag of Auntie Anne’s pretzel nuggets and a pair of cheap earrings at Claire’s. Bemoaning my love for this soulless crap—and not paying attention to my route—I found myself at the entrance to NORD, the National Organization for Rare Disorders. Read More
April 25, 2017 Our Correspondents Shells and Skulls By Anelise Chen Delighting in the mollusks of art history. Photo: Angela Chen. Typical of her species, the clam deactivated all of her social-media accounts on her thirtieth birthday and headed to the sea, not wanting anyone to wish her well. She was unable to explain this urge to hide on what most considered a momentous transition—thirty!—a day that’s usually reserved for last-hurrah debauchery. Instead, she Googled cabin rentals in Sag Harbor, where she and her husband would be unlikely to run into anyone they knew. On the drive out, a misty rain cloaked the empty highway. It rained all night, so they stayed in, drank bourbon, and watched The Shining in bed. The next morning, when she went out for a jog along the shore, the liminal space between sea and sky looked fuzzy, indistinct. She searched for something to latch on to. In the city, she tended to look up, searching for scalloped edges and glimpses of figures in lit windows, but by the sea, she looked at the sand. Whatever she picked up she put back down, knowing from experience that these objects would never be as beautiful as they were at first glance, half submerged and luminous in the frayed light. * She couldn’t explain it then, the urge to hide on one’s birthday, but recently she read a passage in Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost about the molting behavior of hermit crabs that explained it perfectly. Hermit crabs have soft, vulnerable bodies, so they scavenge for shells left behind by mollusks. Aside from shedding their exoskeletons, this shell-search is the riskiest part of a crab’s life. Between scurrying out of a too-small shell to a better-fitted one, any number of things can happen: she could get eaten, lose her old shell to an opportunist crab, or get dragged off by a male crab for mating. At the cusp of the molt, the last thing she wants to do is call attention to herself, so she buries herself in the sand or waits underneath a rock. Read More
April 18, 2017 Our Correspondents Sing, Together, as Long as We’re Alive By Alison Kinney and Mechi Annaís Estévez Cruz A conversation about ¡Figaro! 90210 and immigrants’ rights at the opera. Mozart’s 1786 opera Le nozze di Figaro has been set in a Trump Tower penthouse and at a Jewish wedding in contemporary Germany. Now, for a week in New York City, Vid Guerrerio’s adaptation, ¡Figaro! 90210, sets Mozart’s music to an English/Spanish libretto—and puts Conti in a red baseball cap. Of course, the plot still features two spirited, ingenious working people trying to free themselves from the abuses of the powerful, but now Figaro and Susana are undocumented Mexican household workers singing their opening duet in Spanish, on the grounds of the Beverly Hills mansion of their pussy-grabbing employer, Mr. Conti. Susana explains that the boss has given them a pool-house apartment to facilitate his assaults on her: “I see this coming when he tell me he help me get my visa … ‘Good girls, they get green cards. Girls who don’t obey their boss get deported.’ ” Le nozze di Figaro lends itself well to this kind of reworking; rebellion is in its DNA. Its eighteenth-century premiere came only a few years before the French and Haitian Revolutions. The opera derived from a play by Beaumarchais (who was also an arms dealer for the American Revolution) of which Louis XVI said, “For this play not to be a danger, the Bastille would have to be torn down first”; Napoleon, for his part, called it “the Revolution in action.” The opera’s librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, lightened the play’s political radicalism to bypass Austrian censors, earning Joseph II’s approval and a special palace performance commission. Yet the plot remains subtly subversive, addressing both the vulnerability and moral superiority of women and workers, and the violence of the ruling classes and their henchmen. After the marvelously entertaining opening night, the two of us compared notes to figure out what kind of audience ¡Figaro! 90210 was for. Not everybody, we observed, was happy with the adaptation. Read More
April 13, 2017 Our Correspondents Clam Down By Anelise Chen Anelise Chen is the Daily’s newest correspondent. Her column will explore the scientific phylum Mollusca. This week, a clam has an identity crisis. James M. Sommerville, Ocean Life. She hadn’t meant to become a bivalve mollusk, but it happened. Last fall, after a rib-bruising bike crash caused by momentary inattentiveness and conditions of reduced visibility (sobbing while cycling) the mollusk had briefly succumbed to an episode of hysteria, during which her mother kept texting her to “clam down.” Clam down, she demanded in that sober, no-nonsense way. At first, the clam looked all around her, like, Who, me? Until she realized that her mother was addressing her. * It made sense. Since the clam’s separation from her partner, she had been consuming a lot of calcium carbonate. This is what clams and other shell-building animals use to make their shells. She kept rolls of them in her bag, and they got whittled down throughout the day with alarming speed. On her desk, beside her usual writing implements—pen, notepad—was a flip-top container that was more fun to feed off of; it rattled percussively when she shook the tabs out into her palm. These tabs were tropically flavored, in delicate pastel colors. Humans were not supposed to ingest more than ten per day, but clams could eat them as needed. Both species possessed a stomach, and hers hurt most of the time. Read More
April 11, 2017 Our Correspondents The Feminine Heroic By Megan Mayhew Bergman Megan Mayhew Bergman’s column is about naturalism. This week, she discusses how women, often excluded from adventure narratives, carve out their own heroic space. Melinda Gibson, Photomontage XXIII, 2009-2011. Courtesy the artist and ROSEGALLERY/ It’s February 1959. Marilyn Monroe and Isak Dinesen have joined Carson McCullers for lunch at her home on the Hudson River in Nyack, New York. A photograph from that day shows Marilyn and Carson leaning into each other. Isak, invited to America by the Ford Foundation for what would be her first and last visit, toasts Arthur Miller, who’s nearly out of the frame. Carson wears all black and a depressed demeanor. Marilyn, in fur and a plunging neckline, tells a story about finishing pasta with a blow-dryer. Isak’s cheekbones announce themselves underneath the hem of her turban; she recalls the first time she killed a lion and ingests little more that day than oysters, grapes, and amphetamines. In eight years they will all be dead. For me, the picture is like looking at the fractal nature of womanhood: something carnal, intellectual, and willful existing inside of one body. Internal conflicts shaped Monroe, McCullers, and Dinesen as creators. Marilyn aspired to make her own films and control her image while negotiating a growing dependence on pills and fear of abandonment. McCullers, broken down by seizures, divorce, and addiction, continued to write in the shadow of the masterpiece she wrote at twenty-two. Dinesen, brave enough to face down a lion and manage a coffee farm outside of Nairobi, began to starve and diminish herself. Simone de Beauvoir wrote that “all oppression creates a state of war”—and living in a state of war is depleting, as one tries to negotiate what she owes herself against what the world wants to collect. Read More
April 3, 2017 Our Correspondents Hardware Store Doppelgänger By Jane Stern May contain duplicates. There’s a mom-and-pop hardware store half a mile from my house. It’s the kind of place that if you need two nails, or a small screwdriver, or some bug spray, you might choose it over Home Depot. I really like this store, but I’ve had some weird experiences there—specifically, I’ve been mistaken for someone else on multiple occasions. This doesn’t happen to me a lot outside the hardware store. I have a unique look. I don’t mean that as a boast or a knock; I just don’t resemble many other people. The hardware-store doppelgänger business started about two years ago, when I went in to buy a pint of paint. I noticed a man staring at me, and then sidling up to me, and then changing his mind and walking away. I am not a big fan of sidling, so I made hard eye contact with him, flashing my fiercest what-do-you-want look. Read More