“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” Robert Frost writes in “Mending Wall” – one of two Frost poems, the other being “The Tuft of Flowers,” that addresses the nature of human relationships. “That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, and spills the upper boulders in the sun; and makes gaps even two can pass abreast.”
The poem ends with the neighbor telling the poet famously, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Well, they certainly make resentful ones. This has been a week of walls, literal and metaphoric, courtesy of President Donald J. Trump. There is the actual, proposed wall between Mexico and the United States whose cost would be covered by a tariff on Mexican imports like avocados. (Oh, no, whither Cinco de Mayo?) To say that Mexico is not taking this well is the understatement of 10 lifetimes. El Presidente Enrique Peña Nieto – not exactly the most popular man south of the border – nonetheless got a boost at home after he cancelled his meeting with Trump, though the two have since spoken by phone. ...
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Read MoreI was a selfish child. Make that a self-centered child marked by a self-possession that I wore as a kind of armor against difficult parents and, later, other difficult authority figures. When I was 13, I had a teacher who told us students that selfishness was the root of all evil, the vice from which all others emanate. (She herself was a horror who should’ve practiced what she preached.)
But there is a fine line, I understood, between selfishness and self-possession in service of self-preservation. Recently, one of the columnists I edit wrote a piece in which he observed that there’s a reason that airlines ask you to put on your own oxygen mask first in case of an emergency: You cannot help others if you yourself are in harm’s way.
Which brings us to the new era – actually the cyclical era – of America First. ...
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Read MoreThe latest salvo in the culture war that is surely to deepen under President Donald Trump was fired by Meryl Streep in a graceful and grace-filled speech at the Golden Globes.
I’m not a fan of people using award shows as a bully pulpit, coming of age as I did in the 1970s when such Oscar speeches (think Vanessa Redgrave and an absent Marlon Brando) were a kind of cliché. I’m not a fan of gesture politics like refusing to stand for the National Anthem. I’m not even a fan of Meryl Streep, a sometimes mannered actress (“Sophie’s Choice,” “The Hours”) who’s nevertheless capable of great work (“Marvin’s Room,” “The Manchurian Candidate”).
But Streep – a hard-working craftswoman who has paid her dues – offered a master class in a performer giving a political speech by turning the concept of the politician as performer inside out. ...
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Read MoreThough I admired Debbie Reynolds’ and Carrie Fisher’s talents, I can’t say that I followed their careers particularly. And yet, the deaths of this mother and daughter – one day apart, the daughter’s, Fisher’s, first on Dec. 27, perhaps causing the mother’s from a broken heart– resonate with me. As the daughter of a glamorous mother who often upstaged me, I got the “Postcards From the Edge” aspect of the Debbie-Carrie relationship. But as the niece of a beloved aunt who raised me and whom I mourn so intently that I just dreamt about her the other night, I also understand the Debbie-Carrie who lived next door to each other.
The mother-daughter bond is perhaps not as fraught as the power struggle between fathers and sons but it is no doubt more intense. At its heart is the quest for control and perfection that is part of each woman’s hypercritical life. But there’s also an intimacy and, yes, a real love as mothers and daughters become neighbors, roommates and friends. ...
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Read MoreWith the recent death of Fidel Castro – and the return of “The Hollow Crown” series to PBS, based on Shakespeare’s Henry and Richard histories – my thoughts turn to Vergina, the highlight of My Big Fat Greek Odyssey and a place were leaders were made and unmade.
It was here in the ancient capital of Aigai that Philip II was assassinated on his daughter Cleopatra’s wedding day in a kind of “Godfather” moment. It was here that his son and Cleopatra’s full brother, Alexander, became king. And it was here that the ancient burial mounds of kings of Macedon were unearthed by archaeologist Manolis Andronokis in 1977.
Today, a museum sits on the site, with another coming. We arrived on a rainy morning and were immediately delivered into a world that is overwhelming. This is a dark space that throws the treasures it protects into dramatic relief. Crowns of gold leaves. ...
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Read More"Behind every great man is a great woman”: It’s an adage that’s been brought home to in our postfeminist age. Witness the apotheosis of Michelle Obama on the cover of the current Vogue and the new “Jackie,” with Natalie Portman transcendent as the tragic former first lady.
Indeed, her Jacqueline B. Kennedy and Jackie herself are better than director Pablo Larrain’s “Jackie.” For one thing, the movie’s music, no doubt intended to strike a discordant note, is merely jarring. It underscores other false notes. Why is the boy who plays John F. Kennedy Jr. a blond? And why does Peter Sarsgaard’s Robert F. Kennedy fail to speak with his distinctive broad Boston cadence, particularly when Portman’s Jackie speaks in her signature breathy New Yorkese? And why do we see her not once but twice in a red gown when she mainly favored white and pastel formal wear?
Perhaps this is quibbling. What “Jackie” and Portman’s Jackie do very well is locate her grief and then show us how she cycles through it, reinventing her husband, his presidency – and, thus, herself – in what remains in some ways a pyrrhic victory. ...
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Read MoreCulture vulture that I am, I somehow missed the cultural appropriation wars that have erupted. That’s what you get for going on vacation and unplugging.
First, novelist Lionel Shriver apparently set off a firestorm at the Brisbane Writer’s Festival with a defense of artists using other people’s races, ethnicities, sexualities, etc. in their creations. Then Claudio Gatti outed the comfortable Roman translator Anita Raja as the author of the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante novels about the friendship between two poor Neapolitan girls.
Meanwhile, Bristol University cancelled a production of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Aida,” because students protested white people playing Egyptians and Ethiopians. ...
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