March 11, 2019 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue: 

 1. I enjoyed Helen Rosner’s “A Season for Everything,” particularly this sentence: “Nakayama chatted with one of her seafood suppliers, who had dropped by to deliver four burly kegani, or horsehair crabs, their strawberry-colored shells covered in spiky whiskers.” 

2. James Marcus’s moving “Blood Relations,” an essay on the death of his father, contains this memorable definition of “palliative care”: 

The word comes from the Latin pallium, which is a cloak. It means that the patient will be enveloped, protected, wrapped in a mantle of painkilling techniques that are often pharmaceutical but may also consist of old-fashioned human tenderness. It’s what we should want for the people we love. But it also signals that the fight is over. It is a white flag, a coming to terms with extinction. 

 3. Another excellent piece, David Remnick’s “Holding the Note,” profiles bluesman Buddy Guy. Remnick’s mention of Alberta Hunter reminded me of Whitney Balliett’s superb “Let it Be Classy” (The New Yorker, October 31, 1977; included in Balliett’s great 1979 collection American Singers), in which he describes Hunter singing her classic “Downhearted Blues”: 

Jimmy Rowles played a four-bar introduction, and Alberta Hunter began the famous lyrics: “Got the world in a jug, stopper right here in my hand. Got the world in a jug, stopper right here in my hand. The next man I get, he’s got to come under my command.” Her voice was steady and rich, and her vibrato betrayed none of the quaveriness that often besets older singers. Her phrasing was legato, and once in a while she used a high, almost falsetto cluster of notes which recalled Ethel Waters. There is a burnished, accreted assurance and depth and color on Alberta Hunter’s singing. At first, she stood nearly motionless. She moved one knee on the beat, and occasionally she raised her right arm and smoothed the air with her hand. 

 4. In his absorbing “Modernism for All,” a review of MoMA’s “Joan Miró: Birth of the World,” Peter Schjeldahl says of Miró’s “Painting,” “It stirs a personal memory.” Schjeldahl’s piece stirred a personal memory for me, too. When I was fifteen, my family and I lived in Saint John, New Brunswick. I recall bringing home a library book on Miró’s work. My father, who’d never shown any interest in art, leafed through it and took a fancy to a painting of a strange constellation of eyeballs, stars, and horned creatures. He liked it so much, he decided to make an imitation of it. He bought a big sheet of plywood, covered it with canvas, painted it tan, plotted all the shapes on it in pencil, glued twine on the sinuous lines and painted it black, then painted all the shapes, following Miró’s colors – red, white, blue, black, even a dab of yellow. I helped him with it. When it was finished, we hung it in the living room of our Fort Howe apartment. That was a long time ago. We moved several times after that. Our homemade Miró disappeared. I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know the name of the original. Google provides the painting, but not its title: