Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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This week on nybooks.com: More from our anniversary issue: on Charlie Parker, Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, and Patrick White. Also blog posts about the Tea Party, a shocking Chinese film, the problem with the traditional novel, a new opera at the Met, the demise of the New York City Opera, and a new production of Juno and the Paycock. And from the Review’s next issue, the editor of The Guardian on Edward Snowden’s leaks. Subscribe today and get a free David Levine calendar.
FICTION Patrick White: Within a Budding Grove J. M. Coetzee Patrick White had the typically great-writerly sense of being marked out from birth for an uncommon destiny and granted a talent—not necessarily a welcome one—that it is death to hide, that talent consisting in the power to see, intermittently, flashes of the truth behind appearances.
MUSIC Bird! Adam Shatz Charlie Parker has often been accused of abusing his gifts, but few have denied them. As the trumpeter Red Rodney put it, Parker “could play a tomato can and make it sound great.” He was the most imaginative improviser in jazz since Louis Armstrong, and the most influential saxophonist in its history.
POETRY Badger, Mole, and Marianne Moore Helen Vendler The family life of the Moores famously consisted of their incessantly writing letters to each other (Marianne once wrote from Bryn Mawr a 150-page description of a four-day visit to a friend). The letters are in themselves peculiar in their frequency, length, and adventitious detail, but even more peculiar is the trio’s intense adoption of names from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, names by which Mary becomes “Mole” (the stay-at-home), Marianne is “Rat” (the writer), and Warner is “Badger.”
REDISCOVERY A Neglected Aspect of Chapman T. S. Eliot We publish here for the first time Eliot’s lecture on George Chapman, the Elizabethan and Jacobean poet, dramatist, and translator. Eliot delivered this lecture, which scholars have long believed lost, on November 8, 1924.
					POLITICS The New Battle for Congress Elizabeth Drew What happens next? Will Ted Cruz and his allies continue to threaten the very workings of the federal government while they pursue a lost cause? Both Mitch McConnell and John Boehner have declared that there will be no more shutdowns—but Cruz has pledged to carry on his crusade. Can he be stopped the next time?
OPERA Alone in a Roomful of Ghosts Geoffrey O’Brien While watching the new opera Two Boys at the Met, I experienced something like the divided consciousness of an online multitasker, that curious fusion of total absorption and total distraction.
FILM Unhinged in China Ian Johnson The four interlocking stories that make up A Touch of Sin are meant to encompass the geographic sweep of China, and what director Jia Zhangke sees as the epidemic of violence and amorality in modern Chinese life. All the stories are about members of China’s working classes, victims of social change who end up as violent desperados.					LITERATURE Trapped Inside the Novel Tim Parks More and more I wonder if it is possible for a novel not to give me the immediate impression of being manipulated toward goals that are predictable and unquestioned.
MUSIC They Changed Opera Tim Page The collapse of the New York City Opera last month was many things, but it could hardly be called unexpected. Indeed, that the company had kept going for seventy years was more than a little amazing.				THEATER Sean O’Casey’s Women Sam Sacks The early scenes of Juno and the Paycock often sound like laugh-track television. But through a series of classic narrative reversals—a vanished inheritance, an abandoned fiancée, an act of political vengeance—what starts as a rollicking lowbrow comedy becomes a bitter, deeply moving tragedy.