Azure Azure
It’s that wafer ash set next to the hardy Dutchman’s pipe that reminds me of the unlikely sight we caught on hotel cable TV: Al Schön espousing orange wines. Two decades ago, he was the school’s athlete-Platonist. And now we’re all as louche and brown around the edges as this Baronne Prevost. The Julia Child, the Rise and Shine —these rosebuds exist to ornament fulsome christenings. So it happens today that Azure is introduced toddling in a glade of bamboo topping out at a whisper on the hillside. “Azure, meet our Gray.” “Gray, Azure.”
Mar 21, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Ange Mlinko
Winging It: The Battle Between Reagan and PATCO Winging It: The Battle Between Reagan and PATCO
The true economic legacy of the Reagan years is not tax cuts but union busting.
Mar 21, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Chris Lehmann
Cicadas Cicadas
Gray rainbows in the nighttime irrigation. Immediately forgotten. Then I hear a child carry a tune in a whisper. I was dashing through those ashen rainbows immediately forgotten. You could truncate butterfly to butte and still get migration and a cumin route. But not camel. Not emu. Not Tuareg. Not a Russian garlic dome like painted clove on steppe nor geodesic ostrich egg. Totally forgotten, til the child’s moonbow tune whispered in what wagon, rickshaw, landau rattled me to a carrefour. I couldn’t tell the autumn from the drought, crescent over Quonset hut, or put language to the pulp that made me ill. Inside the mouth of the water-flow monitors, goblin goblin—robin. New World cicadas that chant in parabolas. A new address, a dryness, they stop. Focal chill.
Mar 21, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Ange Mlinko
Alice Kaplan: Angela Davis’s France Alice Kaplan: Angela Davis’s France
For a young black student, France was not the refuge it was reputed to be.
Mar 15, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Francis Reynolds
If Vaclav Havel Met Occupy’s Human Mic… If Vaclav Havel Met Occupy’s Human Mic…
The words of the former president of the Czech Republic resonate with the problems Occupy confronts today.
Mar 14, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Jonathan Schell
The Republican Finalists The Republican Finalists
Regarding those still in the race And all the sighs they engender, All small-time pols quote Brando now: “I coulda been a contender.”
Mar 14, 2012 / Column / Calvin Trillin
Gaddis’s Kennan: Strategies of Disparagement Gaddis’s Kennan: Strategies of Disparagement
Intent on blaming the cold war simply on Soviet perfidy, John Lewis Gaddis does a disservice to the subject of his biography—and to his readers.
Mar 14, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Eric Alterman
Dreaming in French: On Angela Davis Dreaming in French: On Angela Davis
Angela Davis’s student years in France were an alchemy of discipline and distraction.
Mar 14, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Alice Kaplan
Shelf Life Shelf Life
Laurent Dubois’s Hati: The Aftershocks of History.
Mar 14, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
The Suit The Suit
She said take it off slowly so I can Master when it begins; I want to watch How you work button by button through Each skillful undertaking and so he moved As if to include her but she would not touch Or help with jacket or tie, determined To solve from where he comes and also To learn the color of how he can disappear Into the sea of more and more Black. She is tired of thinking Further. This time everything off until the firmament Shows up. Upon which she puts down the compass Of her body to lie along the pressed Cloth and slip into all that dark material Each arm, wrist against each cuff to see how It is done.
Mar 14, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Sophie Cabot Black