Julia Louis-Dreyfus was not feeling relaxed. In a few weeks, she would be receiving the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, in a televised ceremony at the Kennedy Center, and she was anxious about her speech. “It’s, like, ‘If you’re so fucking funny, get up onstage and prove it!’ ” she said one morning in Los Angeles. She was sitting in a white bathrobe, having her makeup done, in a room at the Glendale Hilton, where she was shooting an episode of her HBO series, “Veep.” Louis-Dreyfus has nine Screen Actors Guild Awards and a Golden Globe, and she shares with Cloris Leachman the record for the most Emmys accumulated by an actor: one for playing Elaine Benes, on “Seinfeld,” the role that made her a star; one for her performance in “The New Adventures of Old Christine”; and six for playing Selina Meyer, on “Veep.” But the Twain prize felt different. “Anyone can bomb,” she muttered. “Oh, God. Whatever.”
When the makeup was finished, a stylist ran a curling iron through Louis-Dreyfus’s shiny brown bob, one of several wigs she’s worn while making “Veep,” in order to minimize her preparation time. Her real hair is explosively curly, when it hasn’t been coaxed into sleekness for an event. These days, it is also “blasted by chemotherapy and still growing out,” after six rounds of treatment that Louis-Dreyfus underwent last year for breast cancer. She’d decided to address her illness and recovery at the Twain prize, but, as she put it, “I don’t want it to be ‘The Cancer Show at the Kennedy Center.’ ”
The cyclone of exuberance that is Yo-Yo Ma tore through the Washington, D.C., area at the end of November. The cellist is in the middle of a sprawling tour called the Bach Project, which involves performances of Bach’s six solo-cello suites in thirty-six places, on six continents. Classical music has taken to attaching the word “project” to undertakings large and small. If two or more Brahms symphonies are played, it becomes a Brahms Project. The Bach Project, though, is deserving of the name. Most of Ma’s concerts are slated for large spaces capable of accommodating thousands. Each is accompanied by a Day of Action, in which Ma meets with local artists, community leaders, students, and activists, exploring how culture can contribute to social progress. In Washington, the venue was the National Cathedral. The Day of Action took place in Anacostia, the historic African-American neighborhood in southeast D.C.
Ma began the day at We Act Radio, a progressive Anacostia station. Joining him was the jazz composer, bassist, and singer Esperanza Spalding, who, as a participant in the Kennedy Center’s Turnaround Arts program, works with a local school. Ma said that he had come to Anacostia because of the community’s efforts to strengthen itself through culture. “You give of yourselves from substance,” he said. “It’s not money, it’s not just work, it’s that you give of yourselves, and, when you do that, that’s when beauty emerges.” He then played the Prelude of Bach’s G-major Suite. Kymone Freeman, the station’s co-founder, approved. “This is the type of culture that should be exposed to our children,” Freeman told his listeners. “The first thing that gets cut is art. The last thing that gets funded is art.”
In his photo series “My DNA,” currently on view at the Catherine Edelman Gallery, in Chicago, Koerner, a professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, confronts the long legacy of the atomic bomb in his family. Kimiko’s diagnosis was the beginning of a string of medical crises. Koerner’s brother, Richard, died of pneumonia in 2002, at the age of thirty-two. Richard couldn’t fight the infection because he didn’t have a spleen–it was removed years earlier as part of his treatment for Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Around the time of his funeral, Koerner learned, from a cousin, that he had been the eldest not of two boys but of five: three brothers had been lost to crib death, stillbirth, or miscarriage. His mother would die, from complications due to Cushing’s disease, in 2008. “I used to say, ‘Family, what family?’ ” Koerner told me on a recent afternoon. “All of mine are dead.” In “My DNA,” he used collodion tintype, a laborious method of photography that was in vogue during the eighteen-fifties. His process, which involves sloshing, slapping, flinging, and blowing chemicals through a straw, yields abstract works that tackle the subject of atomic radiation through transformation, dilution, and chance—in short, the fraught process of inheritance. “See those fractal patterns, these bursts?” he asked me, pointing at at work titled “Fingerprints #6187.” “They’re mutations.”
At the time, I knew that my urge to write about the swim, that sensation of my body’s submersion, was something shared and most likely inspired by contemporary writers such as Philip Hoare, Amy Liptrot, and Jessica J. Lee. Expanding the bracket, I was not only paying tribute to these authors, who mix memoir and swimming in what have been called “swimoirs” or “waterbiographies,” but also the parent group they have dovetailed from: the personal nature writing of authors like Helen Macdonald, William Fiennes, and Robert Macfarlane. What all these authors specialize in, through their particular strand of what some call “literary nonfiction,” is taking their niche subject of interest — swimming, falconry, walking — and broadening its appeal to a wider audience. Like Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, the books’ specific subjects end up serving as unique kaleidoscopes through which to approach universal intrigues such as identity, love, and grief.
In recent years, the younger descendants of Macfarlane et al. have seemingly inverted the concept; in their work, the “literary” of “literary nonfiction” not only applies to the techniques and style of the writing but also to its subject matter. In the work of authors such as Lara Feigel, Elif Batuman, and Philip Hoare, literature and cultural history are at the forefront, the middlemen through which the books edge into wider reflections. Like many others, I found these books captivating, particularly Hoare’s RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR, which amalgamates the “swimoir” and literary nonfiction. But what I know now is that they are in fact indebted to and eclipsed by a work written in 1992, which stands as the grandfather of this particular strand of literary nonfiction. The author is Charles Sprawson; the book, Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero.
Angelou’s cookbooks shouldn’t be read in isolation from her larger body of work or treated as sidelines to her poetry. They offer further evidence of her literary style, unflinching in their humor and pathos. While her food writing may have been a more roundabout way to function as the people’s poet, Angelou treated a recipe, as she treated her poems, as a means to earn trust. “The reader has to believe what the writer is saying or else the book has failed,” she told the Guardian in 2011. “The same applies to cooking; if there is no integrity to the recipes, no one will trust them.”