Hope your week went smoothly. It’s Joe Biden and the Secret Service! (I went to Delaware yesterday.)
Links
A number of notable people have passed away the last few weeks, beginning with Chadwick Boseman. You may have seen all the following, but they’re all great:
Danai Gurira’s remembrance on Instagram is really elegant.
Wesley Morris published a great piece about how hard dignity is to make compelling (which Boseman did), and Elamin Abdelmahmoud also wrote on dignity, but more externally — the way everyone else saw Boseman and what he represented, especially to black consumers of culture, young and old.
This Jon Meacham remembrance of journalist Julia Reed is pretty lively (it opens with the literal Madeira school murder), but this Hilton Als Instagram post about her is also great: “It was at a party for a mutual friend and Julia was the co-host, and had devised the menu. I’ve kept it with me all these years as a model of order surprise and savory good taste.”
Lot of great John Thompson stories out there, as well, but I liked this Twitter thread from an old college basketball reporter (this one’s funny).
And this on Gail Sheehy is really good, as well. Can’t beat this general outlook:
She was in touch often, with ideas that worked and ideas that didn’t, reframing and trying again when something wasn’t right the first time, with a “put me in, coach!” level of energy. When Heather Heyer was killed in Charlottesville, she immediately headed down to Virginia, started reporting on the ground, and filed this rich portrait for the Cut. It was the kind of thing that an on-the-rise cub reporter of 25 would do. Gail, at the time, was 80.
Vin Scully misses the fans so he’s gotten on Twitter — this is an extremely gentle, kind interview, just as you would expect from Vin Scully.
This U.S. Open is apparently the first grand slam of the 21st century (it’s 2020!) that both Nadal and Federer aren’t playing in. This Times piece has a funny bit in it from Martina Navratilova, though, about how majors didn’t used to matter and that the “Virginia Slims championship” used to be third most important — which is just like super 1970s, John-Belushi-doing- “Little Chocolate Donuts” in a highly appealing way.
In coronavirus/election news, Old Navy is apparently going to pay employees to be poll workers, which is one of those things that actually makes sense as a corporate act right now (given the shortages of people willing and able).
This is a good, short piece on Faulkner and confederate monuments, and their effective place in society.
Lastly, this is old, but if you’ve been watching the NBA playoffs, the other night they were talking (in like that breezy neutral voice, like announces might talk about how the arena used to be called the MCI Center, where was that place we used to get Chinese around the corner?) about how Jamal Murray’s dad used to make him do pushups in the Canadian snow. Friend pointed me to this good profile from last year on the Murray family regimen.
Light book commentary
Last weekend, I tore through Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police — this one’s more strange in the traditional dark way. Written in 1994, translated into English in 2019, American publishers packaged the book as concerning both authoritarianism and loss. On an unnamed island, with largely unnamed characters, the titular Memory Police disappear objects (flowers, perfume, etc.), after which residents must destroy any trace of them. Most subsequently forget these objects ever existed, but a few do not; everyone's lives deteriorate.
Contra the packaging, there’s also a strong, strong element of what fiction is, who it’s for, and what it means to have writing remembered; the narrator is a novelist; the other two principal characters are her editor and a lovely, gentle old man who’s never read any of her books; and the book contains a short story within a la the novella inside Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin. I found the whole thing compelling until the very, very end when the effect didn’t work for me (which I think is probably personal taste) — if you have read this book, please contact me, so I can hear your take on this ending. But the even keel of the pacing and writing (doesn’t read like a translation) do a real number in terms of slipping from normal-adjacent into this fast-ruined world where no one can remember anything and people’s lives have become very small. And yet, they continue on while demarcating the boundaries of what a good life could look like even in this terrible state.
Also to circle back on Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread, like I said some of the sentences really knock you out, and I was tired last weekend so I didn’t type any up. Here are a few:
Harriet sees all this and more, and she supposes these factors could be used by a newcomer to destabilize the group. But Harriet would never do that! Well, she might, actually, for their own good. Much can be improved through reorganization.
Elsa pleaded her case with all she had (the most memorable of the scenarios she enacted had farmstead life grinding to a halt as frustrated teenaged men fought over her, the only girl left), and this only reinforced her parents’ conviction that they were too fond of her tomfoolery to let her go just yet.
Whoever the boyfriend is, Harriet is ready to take his master class on enchanting the hard-hearted. Or are the hard-hearted only conquered when their deeds are outdone?
A note on all this
Thanks for subscribing. Hope you enjoy. The goal here is just to offer up some links you may have missed, and maybe the occasional commentary on something in politics or a book I may have read that you, the reader, might enjoy. If you have thoughts on any of this, hit me up at katherinemillernyc@gmail.com or just tweet at me.