February 22, 2017 Our Correspondents Sentinel Species By Megan Mayhew Bergman Meditation on a life of birding. Every fall, thousands of snow geese descend on Addison, Vermont, stark-white birds with black wing tips falling to the fields and ponds near the Dead Creek Wildlife Management Area. Every fall I intend to drive north to see them, and every fall I forget and am left with the worry that I will miss the last great season. Last November, in Butte, Montana, a flock of snow geese touched down on what appeared to be a lake, but was instead a pool of toxic, bright-red mine waste called the Berkeley Pit. Bystanders remarked that the scarlet-hued lake, or more precisely the Superfund site, was “white with birds.” Thousands died from exposure to sulfuric acid and heavy metals, dropping lifeless onto roadsides and Walmart parking lots, earthbound heaps of feathered flesh. Birds are sensitive to toxicity, often more so than humans. Parakeets die when exposed to fumes from hot nonstick pans. I think of the bright-yellow caged canaries taken deep underground to warn miners of carbon-dioxide levels. For me, the mass death of birds is an early indicator of future human welfare, a bad omen. Margaret Atwood, in an interview, said, “An involvement with birds is a reliable hook into the state of the planet.” Read More
February 22, 2017 On History The Nazi Mind By Damion Searls How psychiatrists used Rorschach tests to examine Nazis during the Nuremberg trials. Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring. By 1945, the word Nazi—for a member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—had become shorthand around the world for a cold-blooded sadistic monster beyond the pale of humanity. Six million Jews had been killed. How could any of the Nazis not have known? There was an overwhelming desire to stage the World vs the Nazis, with the defendants all guilty and deserving to die, but there was no clear legal basis for doing so. And the truth was that not all of the Holocaust’s perpetrators were party members, and vice versa. It was impossible, logistically and in principle, to condemn every single party member as a war criminal. The atrocities were unprecedented in human history, but for that very reason it was unclear what laws fit the crime. The legal issues were resolved by negotiation among the Allies and by fiat. An international military tribunal was created. “Crimes against humanity” were prosecuted for the first time, at the Nuremberg trials, beginning in 1945. Twenty-four prominent Nazis were chosen as the first group of defendants. But the moral quandaries remained. The defendants claimed that they had been following their own country’s laws, which in this case meant whatever Hitler wanted. Could people legally be held to account on the basis of a higher law of common humanity? How deep does cultural relativity go? And if these Nazis really were deranged psychopaths, then weren’t they unfit to stand trial, or even not guilty by reason of insanity? Read More
February 22, 2017 On the Shelf Whitman’s Secret Novel, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Whitman, butterfly. Not pictured: secret serialized novel. Look, we all have crappy novels that we’ve anonymously serialized in some small-time regional newspaper. (Mine is about a family of panda bears who vacation at the North Pole, where they befriend some itinerant polar bears.) We go to the grave expecting these novels never to be revealed. But now some hotshot grad student has tracked down Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, a swashbuckling mystery novel by one Walt Whitman, who published it without credit in New York’s Sunday Dispatch circa 1852. The novel, as Jennifer Schuessler writes, boasts “antic twists, goofy names, and suddenly revealed conspiracies,” but it’s at its best when its hero loses the plot and pauses for some Leaves of Grass–style musing: “Jack enters the cemetery at Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, and the madcap plot grinds to a halt in favor of reveries about nature, immortality and the oneness of being that strikingly echo the imagery of Whitman’s great work. ‘Long, rank grass covered my face,’ says Jack, the first-person narrator. ‘Over me was the verdure, touched with brown, of trees nourished from the decay of the bodies of men.’ Jack wanders among those bodies of men, copying out the inscriptions of the tombstones of Alexander Hamilton, the War of 1812 hero Capt. James Lawrence (of ‘Don’t give up the ship!’ fame) and other lost lives. Then, he exits onto the streets, where ‘onward rolled the broad, bright current’—and quickly and rather indifferently wraps up his own story.” Salamishah Tillet on the power and the glory of black marching bands: “In Jules Allen’s Marching Bands, a stunning collection of social documentary, portraiture, and panoramic photography, he takes us into this behind-the-scenes world of African-American marching bands all over the country. ‘Whenever a marching band would come through, it would take me to pieces,’ Allen has said. ‘In particular, Morgan State. They were just something else: the rhythm, the movement, the precision, the timing. What I call now the pulse and beat of what they were doing. It all seemed so particular to an African-American sensibility’ … In one of my favorite images, we spy a school marching band in downtown Durham, North Carolina. Flanked by a school bus and a parked car, everyone is in motion—they are either preparing for a parade or getting back on the bus. Drums are littered everywhere, even a trumpet on the ground, while one young man holds his arm up, trombone to his side, as if mentally rehearsing either his first notes or remembering his last ones. Behind him a young trombonist looks on, while to his right, a trumpeter in full costume stares. Band members walk in opposite directions, some smiling, some somber, as a mural, ‘The Black Wall Street Community,’ creates a telling backdrop.” Read More
February 21, 2017 Listen Maya Angelou with George Plimpton By The Paris Review Tonight PBS’s American Masters series debuts “Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise,” the first-ever feature documentary on the writer. The Paris Review’s George Plimpton, himself the star of a 2014 American Masters documentary, interviewed Angelou onstage at 92Y in 1988. That conversation laid the groundwork for Angelou’s Art of Fiction interview, which appeared in our Fall 1990 issue. But the audio from that night at 92Y is worth listening to in its own right—it finds both of them in rare form. As Plimpton wrote, Angelou’s “presence dominated the proceedings. Many of her remarks drew fervid applause, especially those which reflected her views on racial problems, the need to persevere, and ‘courage.’ She is an extraordinary performer and has a powerful stage presence.” Read More
February 21, 2017 First Person Dog Star By Hilary Reid Wandering the Westminster Dog Show on Valentine’s Day. Rumor takes Best in Show at the 2017 Westminster Dog Show. Photo: Tilly Grassa A middle-aged show-dog handler in green cargo shorts and black Birkenstocks crouches in front of a gray kennel. “Wait until you see what Daddy brought you for dinner,” he says to the purebred Cesky terrier within. I watch as Daddy carefully unwraps a Burger King Whopper. “You’re a star,” he tells the dog, breaking off a piece of the meat patty and sliding it through the crate’s metal door. In just under an hour, Daddy will put on a Paisley shirt and an ivory suit; he’ll take the terrier, officially known as Bluefire Heart of a Warrior, for a walk on the pristine Astroturf at Madison Square Garden before the thousands of people gathered on Valentine’s Day for the 141st Westminster Dog Show. Established in 1877, the Westminster Dog Show is the second longest continually held sporting event in the United States, after the Kentucky Derby. The Jumbotron at MSG offers a kind of potted history, with sepia photos of old New York fading in and out; the narrator’s refined, sonorous voice floats over a violin. A hundred and forty years ago, he explains, a group of “sporting gentlemen” gathered at the bar of the bygone Westminster Hotel on Sixteenth Street and Irving Place in Manhattan to drink and brag about their hunting feats. Looking for a venue superior to the sporting field for comparing hounds, they agreed that what Manhattan really needed was a dog show. They formed the Westminster Kennel Club, named after the hotel bar, and soon after the first annual New York Bench Show of Dogs was held at Gilmore’s Garden, the predecessor of Madison Square Garden. The Westminster Dog Show, the narrator informs us, is a “quintessential part of American culture,” having survived both world wars, the moon landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the rise of the Internet. Read More
February 21, 2017 Inside the Issue The Fern Cat By Audrey Harris On Translating Amparo Dávila’s “Moses and Gaspar.” Remedios Varo, El gato helecho (The fern cat) (detail), 1957, oil on Masonite. Amparo Dávila was born in 1928—a fated year in Mexican letters, it also heralded the arrival of Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Ibarguëngoitia, Inés Arredondo, Enriqueta Ochoa, and Carlos Valdés—in the poetically named town of Pinos, in the state of Zacatecas. In interviews, Dávila has stressed the importance of her childhood in her formation as a writer, particularly the loss of her younger brother, who died in infancy. Her earliest memories are of her father’s library; she harbors a special fondness for his leather-bound copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, illustrated by Gustave Doré, which she read and reread even though its images of the infernal circles of hell and fearsome demons terrified her. She also recalls watching dead bodies driven in carts past her house; the surrounding towns had no cemeteries, and the dead had to be transported to her town for burial. The sight of the corpses, sometimes barely covered by sheets, left an indelible impression in her mind and, in turn, her fiction, which visits frequently with the specter of death. For someone like me, who grew up delighting in the ghost stories of Edith Wharton and the gothic illustrations of Edward Gorey, translating Dávila offers a delicious challenge. Entering the world of one of her stories is like walking back in time to the dark and lonely world of Pinos, a semideserted mining town “filled with wind and shadows,” as she described it to Elena Poniatowska in a 1957 interview; it is to witness the corpse-laden carts rattling by and to feel the yawning absence of a lost brother. It is also to experience a golden day in a garden in Guanajuato, when, as a young woman, Dávila quoted a passage from Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince to the exalted Mexican novelist Alfonso Reyes; enchanted, he invited her to visit him in the capital, where she became his assistant. Dávila still resides in Mexico City. She writes in a library whose shelves brim with books by her favorite authors, among them Kafka, Hesse, Paz, and Rulfo, as well as by those with whom she most identifies: Borges, Bioy Casares, Quiroga, and Cortázar (with whom she kept up a literary correspondence and friendship for many years). Read More