Reading the New Yorker

This summer’s fiction issue is the first I can recall dedicated to one genre of fiction. Exciting for me – I grew up on science fiction, but I’ve lost touch with the genre. I was eager to see how it had developed. But I finished the issue still wondering. Continue reading →

In Jake Halpern’s “Secret of the Temple,” we learn right away that in Kerala, India, things don’t work the way we’re used to:

Deities can actually own property in India, though the law treats them as minors and they must be represented by an official guardian.

The differences don’t stop there. The center of this piece is the story of a temple that could hold treasure almost beyond imagining — and the general resistance to unlocking the doors that might conceal it.

In spite of the area’s poverty and the immense riches already found in the temple, local sentiment seems to be to leave well enough alone. Halpern also introduces a smaller, parallel story, common in India: A historian shows him a box he inherited. His grandfather had kept his most valuable possessions in it. The historian had not opened the box.

I’ve always considered the urge to open things to be a general human trait. Any five-year-old knows, two minutes into the story, that Pandora will open that box, or that Bluebeard’s wife will unlock the forbidden door.

But maybe the inability to keep things shut isn’t a general trait. After all, the Westerners who created these stories were immigrants and settlers, people who, for one reason or another, couldn’t leave an acre unexplored (or unexploited). Maybe we are culturally  – and, possibly, genetically — predisposed to open boxes.

Just like the tales of Chinese people meeting the challenges of modern life, I love the possibilities this idea opens for a world  that’s different from the one we have today.

If you don’t usually read the letters to the editor, you missed a couple of important (and fun!) ones early this summer — I can’t remember seeing a writer get clobbered quite so thoroughly before.

In the original piece, “The English Wars,” Joan Acocella wrote about a recent entry in the class-laden war between the prescriptivists (“One must use this word this way!!”) and descriptivists (“But here’s how people actually use this word!”). She closes by telling us that both sides are moving toward the center. But she apparently based her conclusion on a pair of misreadings. Continue reading →

“The Transition,” which traces the events of the day that Lyndon B. Johnson became president, is a riveting excerpt from a book by Robert Caro that comes out today.

Caro has written extensively about LBJ, and all of it is in what I think of as my historical blind spot — that awkward period that was too recent to covered in high school history, but still before I was born. I learned more about Renaissance Italy than about the presidential assassination that shaped the political scene of my childhood.

But I gather that even for those who lived that day, this is fresh perspective. The Week has a nice summary of five revelations from the excerpt, including that LBJ thought his career was over. I guess so much attention goes to the charismatic, martyred president that not much thought gets spared for the guy who took his place.

Caro’s real-time recounting of events is realistically disorienting. Of that day in 1963 in Dallas, a Secret Service agent said, “We didn’t really know what was happening.” The governor had been shot, as well as the president, and the Secret Service didn’t know if other officials were  targets, too. It brought back my own memories of Sept. 11, 2001. We know so well now that four planes were taken, it’s easy to forget that for a while, we thought it could be a lot more.

And the way Caro brought together different narrative threads really worked for me. I had to feel bad for the guy who used to be “Master of the Senate” and thought he had ruined his career with bad decisions. But even though I felt for him, I was taken aback by some of his actions and words that morning.

I was left with a vivid picture of a real person, and I’m still not quite sure what to think of him.