Whether he’s talking about literature, recent political events or policies implemented by his administration, his observations, like his prose, are animated by an ability to connect social, cultural and historical dots, and a gift — honed during his years as a community organizer and professor of constitutional law — for lending complex ideas immediacy and context.
This back-and-forth and those that came before it — Michelle saying she wouldn’t spend time in Springfield if he won an Illinois Senate seat, that she wouldn’t campaign for him as he sought to become a U.S. senator, her moving from no to yes on the presidency — fit the definition of an egalitarian marriage, in which both partners get a say in big decisions.
It’s often in the morning that the want is biggest. The want is to wake up, lazy and horizontal, and have it. Currently I sleep in a big bed, next to a square window above a fig free, which looks out at the local high school, the 110 freeway, and the undeveloped hills in the park beyond. I used to wake up early, but lately – with the want – I sleep until the light is already bright. It doesn’t feel good waking up when the sun is already at work. I feel I’ve wasted something. I feel everybody has gotten going but me, that they are all up and living their lives.
The want that makes me sleep all the time is connected to a video I watch pretty often, of a young white man on his knees, in a nondescript hotel room with silver wallpaper and silver throw pillows.
Judith Schalansky’s collection “An Inventory of Losses” is classified as “Fiction/Essay,” a blurry and enviable label rare in American letters but championed by the book’s publisher, New Directions — texts that cross the boundary from nonfiction into the defamiliarized and ghostly. It situates Schalansky alongside other German writers such as Alexander Kluge and W. G. Sebald, as well as the Latin American authors Jorge Luis Borges, Valeria Luiselli and César Aira. The “inventory” of the title invokes the archives that the author is writing from, as well as the literary form of the list (like Sebald’s cabinets of curiosities and lists of various natural phenomena in his novels).
In the Jeju of Hahn’s imagination, everything on the island is imbued with ancient magic. The ocean is the domain of the sea king. The rocks are “teardrops of Grandma Seolmundae’s five hundred sons.” And the haenyeo, the women freedivers who harvest mollusks, octopus and kelp, resemble mermaids to those outside their exclusive clan.
As we endure the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic – with its attendant “Groundhog Day” ennui, its frustrations and intermittent panics – performing a particular thought-experiment can be both enlightening and consoling. Imagine yourself transported back in time to September 1939; almost six years of the second world war is coming down the historical pike towards you. That would be so much worse than this crisis, surely? The displacement and upheaval in our ordinary lives that we’re experiencing today can’t be remotely similar to the massive, unforeseen turbulence that the world went through then – surely?
“The Shadow Drawing” doesn’t offer the conventional satisfactions of biography: the evocation of Leonardo’s world, his paradoxes and idiosyncrasies, that famous fondness for solitude and rose-pink tunics. The book trains its gaze on his technical and philosophical obsessions. Its focus may feel narrow at times, and yet its pleasures often prove surprisingly wide. The book reorients our perspective, distills a life and brings it into focus — the very work of revision and refining that its subject loved best.
Behold: A vegetarian with his hand up a
Heavy equipment, which is The Count
His deathless numbers! How I loved them.