Showtime has stopped its adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Purity. Taffy Brodesser-Akner talks to him about birds, why people dislike him, what’s next, and his Toyota Camry. “‘Camry is a good car,’ he said. Camry is his first-ever new car. He’d been wary of getting a hybrid because as a young man, he learned to tinker with cars, and a hybrid scared him for the lack of understandable machinery beneath the hood; it’s just a black box, really. But cars have changed so much in recent decades that any new one is unrecognizable to him under the hood anyway.”
William H. Pritchard on Donald Hall’s “mischievous warmth.”
Sean Hannan reviews two new translations of Augustine’s Confessions and reflects on the difficulty of capturing the work’s urgency.
Revisiting Leonard Bernstein’s Peter Pan: “The show Mr. Alden is staging as part of the Bard SummerScape festival at Bard College, starting on Thursday and running through July 22, is not the Mary Martin blockbuster of his youth but an earlier adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s play with a wonderful, undeservedly obscure score by Leonard Bernstein, whose centenary is being celebrated this year. That production — which starred the unlikely combo of Jean Arthur as Peter and Boris Karloff as Captain Hook — closed in 1951 after a respectable 321 performances, but then essentially disappeared.”
Stephen King and Christianity: “While it’s true that organized religion seldom comes off well in his books, King handles the Christian faith itself in a myriad of ways—as the motivator for bravery just as often as cruelty, a reservoir of strength as well as a shield for cowardice. Characters regularly wrestle with the divine, and rarely the same way twice. Sometimes a character’s faith wavers, sometimes it evaporates, sometimes it morphs, and sometimes it triumphs. But it’s almost always there in some way.”
Go fishing: “There is nothing worse than sitting at a desk all day. And there is nothing better than being in or near water with a long stick attached to some kind of cord.”
Essay of the Day:
In The New York Times Magazine, Thomas Chatterton Williams writes about the work of Adrian Piper, who “retired from being black” in 2012:
“Adrian Piper, the conceptual artist and analytic philosopher, is almost as well known for what she has stopped doing as for what she has done. By 1985, she had given up alcohol, meat and sex. In 2005, she took a leave of absence from her job at Wellesley, sold her home on Cape Cod and shipped all of her belongings to Germany. On a lecture tour in the United States the next year, she discovered a mark on her plane ticket that suggested, to her, that she’d been placed on a watch list; she has not set foot in America since. Then, in 2012, on her 64th birthday, she ‘retired from being black.’ She did this by uploading a digitally altered self-portrait to her website, in which she had darkened her skin — normally café très-au-lait — to the color of elephant hide. It was accompanied by a news bulletin announcing her retirement. The pithy text superimposed at the bottom of the photo elaborated: ‘Henceforth, my new racial designation will be neither black nor white but rather 6.25% grey, honoring my 1/16th African heritage,’ she wrote. ‘Please join me in celebrating this exciting new adventure in pointless administrative precision and futile institutional control!’ (Through extensive genealogical work, she later determined that her African heritage is closer to one-eighth.)
“The piece was, like much of Piper’s art and writing, absurdly comical in no small part because it was so brutally honest. It was inspired by Piper’s dawning realization that she was unable to fulfill other people’s expectations through the lens of race; since the early 2000s, she had stopped allowing any of her artwork to be exhibited in all-black shows, which she came to see as ghettoizing. In 2015, she announced that she would no longer talk to the press about her work.”
Photos: Norway
Poem: Mary Quade, “Bunnies”
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