Plus: Rachel Syme; Agnes Callard; Gore Vidal’s Washington
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Today in The New York Review of Books: J. Hoberman travels to the heart of darkness of a North Frisian island; Merve Emre interviews Rachel Syme and Agnes Callard; and, from the archives, Gore Vidal on the ruins of Washington, D.C.
Fatih Akin’s latest feature narrates how World War II shaped a German North Frisian island where my family, too, has complex wartime ties.
“The Art of the Interview” with Merve Emre
“Selfishly, I’m always going into every interview trying to get somebody to teach me how to live, or how to be an artistic person of integrity, a person who has longevity. These are the things that I’m looking for answers to in my own life.”
“Being yourself day after day gets dull after a while. When you get to know these authors from different periods of history and different social worlds, if they are systematic enough, they have a set of thoughts that fit together into a point of view that you can inhabit.”
“How did he do it? Aggressively, brutally, relentlessly—weren’t we all watching him? The more specific answer is that he did it by exploiting the chief executive’s myriad emergency powers…. Another way to put it is that Trump did what Trump does as easily as he breathes: he lied.”
“Wolfgang Koeppen made a living at this and that, for a while as a journalist, and wrote two well-received and poorly selling novels. In 1933, when Hitler was appointed chancellor and Nazism established as Germany’s sole state power, Koeppen went to Holland. As he was not Jewish, or Roma, Sinti, Black, Slavic, homosexual, a communist, a labor leader, or, formally, a dissident, he was not likely to be in official danger, but his publisher was a Jew, he had Jewish friends, he was by nature an intellectual and an aesthete—a type that autocrats tend to view, understandably, with great distaste. And personal safety aside, who, I ask you, wants to live in a country given over to insane, sadistic, thieving, power- and money-mad psychopaths?”
Free from the Archives
With hot, lazy August rolling along and President Trump racing to complete his ludicrous ballroom before the Supreme Court can rule on whether he has the right to build it in the first place, our thoughts turned to Gore Vidal’s 1982 essay “The Ruins of Washington.” Vidal—scion of old Washington—recalls his Depression-era childhood, when New Deal government buildings were erected all over the city, and when he was upbraided by a whiskey-breathed Vice President John Nance Gardner for running barefoot and shirtless through the Capitol building.
Gore Vidal
The Ruins of Washington
“Too many glass buildings were going up. Too many old houses were being torn down or allowed to crumble. Too many slums were metastasizing around Capitol Hill. Also, the prewar decision to make an imperial Roman—literally, Roman—capital our of what had been originally a pleasant Frenchified southern city was, in retrospect, a mistake.”
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