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    Chita Rivera’s Book Will Introduce Fans to the Real Her

    Over the last seven decades, the Broadway star Chita Rivera has taken on and defined some of American musical theater’s most iconic roles: Anita in “West Side Story,” Rose in “Bye Bye Birdie,” Velma Kelly in “Chicago.”In her forthcoming memoir, Rivera introduces her fans and readers to a character she has rarely played in public: her alter ego of sorts, Dolores. And Dolores, which is Rivera’s given name, can be a little prickly, according to Rivera’s co-author, the journalist Patrick Pacheco.When they first sat down to discuss the memoir in the summer of 2020, Pacheco asked Rivera what people didn’t know about her.“She said, ‘Well, I’m not nearly as nice as people think I am,’” he recalled. “I said, ‘Great, let’s introduce the public to her.’”In her still-untitled book, which is due out in 2023 from HarperOne and will be released simultaneously in English and Spanish, Rivera describes her unlikely path to stardom. Born Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero in 1933, Rivera grew up in Washington, D.C., where her mother worked as a government clerk and her father was a clarinet and saxophone player for the U.S. Navy Band.She was so rambunctious and theatrical at home that her mother enrolled her in ballet school. She won a scholarship to George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet and went on to land roles in musicals like “Call Me Madam,” “Guys and Dolls,” “Can-Can” and “West Side Story,” where she delivered a breakout performance as Anita in the musical’s original production. Over the decades, she has been nominated for 10 Tony Awards and has won twice, and received a Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2009, President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.Early in her career, Rivera, who is of Puerto Rican descent, worked to defy the stereotypes that were imposed on her in a largely white creative industry.“She was always very empowered from the beginning to play anything she felt she was capable of playing,” Pacheco said.Some of the theater world’s most influential composers and choreographers were drawn to Rivera’s magnetism and perfectionism. In her memoir, she describes working with Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Bob Fosse, Hal Prince and Fred Ebb, and her experiences with stars and castmates like Elaine Stritch, Dick Van Dyke, Liza Minnelli and Sammy Davis Jr.Rivera, who turned 89 this month, has done career retrospectives before, including “The Dancer’s Life,” a musical celebrating her career. But while friends and colleagues had nudged her over the years to write a memoir, she never felt compelled to until recently.“I’ve never been one to look back,” Rivera said in a statement released by her publisher. “I hope my words and thoughts about my life and career resonate and readers just might discover some things about me they never knew.”Though she’s had a lasting influence on theater as a performer, Rivera is not a writer, and Pacheco was a natural collaborator — he first met her in the 1970s and had already interviewed her extensively in 2005 when he was brought on as a researcher for “A Dancer’s Life.”He and Rivera would meet or talk on the phone once or twice a week as they were working on the book, and he urged Rivera to open up about her private life and to be candid about her not-so-nice side, Pacheco said. “Let’s put them in the room with Chita,” he remembered telling her, “but let’s also put them in the room with Dolores.” More

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    Michael Schur’s Unending Quest to Be Perfect

    The comedy writer, known for shows like “Parks and Recreation” and “The Good Place,” has a surprising new project: a book about moral philosophy that explores how to be a good person.Several years ago, Michael Schur was stuck in Los Angeles traffic when he went into a philosophical tailspin. As he watched other drivers use the emergency lane to escape the gridlock, he started fuming about people who put their desires above everyone else’s, then wondered if such minor ethical lapses even matter.What started as a flash of irritation yielded an idea: What if there were a cosmic point system that tallied our good and bad behavior, and ranked people accordingly? From then on, when Schur saw drivers misbehaving, he would comfort himself by imagining them losing 15 points on their moral score cards.That fantasy helped shape the premise for Schur’s television series, “The Good Place,” a metaphysical comedy set in an afterlife where people are assigned to the Good Place or Bad Place based on their ethical ranking. The show, which starred Kristen Bell as a pathologically selfish pharmaceutical saleswoman accidentally sent to the Good Place, posed complex thought experiments and explored moral principles from philosophers like Aristotle and Kant, all in the framework of a 22-minute sitcom.“The Good Place” ran for four seasons on NBC and was a commercial and critical success. But when the final season aired in 2020, Schur, who’s also known for his work on comedies like “The Office,” “Parks and Recreation” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” felt unsatisfied.“I had this nagging feeling, like I wasn’t done talking about it,” Schur said in a video interview from his home in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife J.J. Philbin, their children William and Ivy, their dogs Henry and Louisa, and a guinea pig named Coco. “I didn’t want to try to do another TV show on the same topic, because that just seemed weird. I’m not sure there’s another TV show that’s explicitly about moral philosophy that anyone would be interested in.”So, in a somewhat surprising pivot, he decided to write a book about ethics.Schur’s debut, “How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question,” which Simon & Schuster will release on Tuesday, is likely the first book about moral philosophy to feature endorsements from Steve Carell, Amy Poehler, Ted Danson and Mindy Kaling. Jeff McMahan, a philosophy professor at Oxford, called it “an enjoyably boisterous guide to the moral life.”From ‘How to Be Perfect’Listen to an audiobook excerpt from “How to Be Perfect,” featuring Michael Schur along with Kristen Bell, William Jackson Harper, Ted Danson and D’Arcy Carden, stars of his TV show “The Good Place.”In about 300 pages, Schur covers some 2,500 years of Western philosophical thought, breaking down concepts like virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism and contractualism, analyzing principles espoused by Aristotle (“a good salesman, and he gets us all excited about his pitch”), Kant (“a pretty rigid dude”) and Camus (“a stone-cold hottie”), and examining arguments from contemporary philosophers like Judith Thomson, Peter Singer, T.M. Scanlon and Johann Broodryk. He raises quandaries that are easy calls (“Should I Punch My Friend in the Face for No Reason?”) along with more challenging thought experiments like the Trolley Problem (“Should I Let This Runaway Trolley I’m Driving Kill Five People, or Should I Pull a Lever and Deliberately Kill One (Different) Person?”) and fraught issues like whether it’s wrong to enjoy art and literature created by people who behave reprehensibly.As a philosophical layman taking on some of the most profound questions humans have pondered, Schur is, naturally, nervous about how the book will be received. “I’m terrified of people who know what they’re talking about reading it and saying, ‘You fool,’” he said. “That’s my greatest fear right now, is that someone is going to read it and out loud, alone in his or her office, say the words, ‘You fool.’”“How to Be Perfect” is out on Jan. 25.At the same time, he felt that as a comedy writer, he could bring a unique lens to the subject.“The smartest people who ever lived have been working really hard for thousands of years to try to explain to us how we can be better people, and how we can improve ourselves, but they wrote so complicatedly and densely and opaquely that no one wants to engage with it,” Schur said. “It’s like a chef had come up with a recipe for chocolate chip cookies that were both delicious and also helped you lose weight, but the recipe was 600 pages long and written in German, and no one read it. And I thought, if we could just translate that to, like, a human language, this would be very helpful.”In some ways, the topic felt unavoidable. Schur, 46, has been preoccupied with how to be a good person for as long as he can remember.“I have been interested-in-slash-obsessed with the concept of ethics my whole life,” he said. “There have been moments when I’ve confronted something about my own behavior, where I realized I was behaving in a ethically questionable way, or had wandered into some complicated situation, that seemed like I would be better equipped to handle it if I knew what the hell I was talking about, ethically speaking.”Writing a book about the quest for ethical perfection, Schur risked coming across as unbearably pedantic or worse, sanctimonious, but he grounds his overviews of abstract doctrines in self-deprecating digressions. He confesses he still has books by Woody Allen on his shelves and hasn’t been able to renounce him even after allegations of sexual abuse came to light. He describes the self-loathing he would feel whenever he left a tip at Starbucks but paused to make sure that the barista saw him do it. He agonizes over his privileged status as an educated, affluent white man, worries that his hybrid car is still bad for the environment and frets that the money he spends on baseball tickets and other luxuries could have gone to people in need. (He’s donating his earnings from the book to several charities and nonprofits, he said.)Born in Ann Arbor, Mich., and raised in Connecticut in a casually Unitarian family, Schur has had a charmed career that he attributes to a series of lucky accidents, beginning with the day he stayed home sick from school and his mom let him watch Allen’s movie “Sleeper.” At Harvard, where he majored in English, he joined the Lampoon, a comedy magazine that has served as a pipeline for TV writers, and those connections helped him land a job as a writer for “Saturday Night Live” in 1998.He was later hired as a writer for “The Office,” and around the third season, he signed an overall deal with NBCUniversal. He went on to cocreate “Parks and Recreation” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” both wholesome workplace comedies. When the network gave him free rein to make a show about anything he wanted, he pitched “The Good Place.”Early on, he ran into a problem: He didn’t know much about moral philosophy. So he started a self-taught course in ethics, reading works by Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Bentham, Rawls and others, and devouring academic papers he found online.When he found concepts to be impenetrable, he sought out professionals. He asked Pamela Hieronymi, a philosophy professor at U.C.L.A, to be an adviser for the show, and she gave lectures in the writers room and guided writers through conundrums like the Trolley Problem. “He wants it to be digestible, but he doesn’t want to water it down,” she said of Schur.Schur also brought on the philosopher Todd May as a consultant after reading his book, “Death.” Schur would sometimes send May an urgent email with a “philosophical emergency” when he was worried he had bungled some ethical nuance.“He is extraordinarily precise, and it’s really important to him to get the theories right,” said May, who also advised Schur on his book.Kristen Bell, William Jackson Harper and Ted Danson in a scene from “The Good Place” that explored the Trolley Problem.Colleen Hayes/NBCThe production sometimes felt more like a grad-school philosophy seminar than a sitcom set. William Jackson Harper, who played a conflicted philosophy professor on “The Good Place,” recalled having conversations with Schur about thorny variations on the Trolley Problem that made his head spin. Bell, who studied the long document that Schur prepared outlining different ethical theories that the show covered, remembers having a discussion with Schur about whether it was OK to eat almonds.“There aren’t a lot of people that have a commitment to examining their role in the world as deeply as he does,” she said.Danson, who played an immortal being and bureaucrat who operates the Good Place, said Schur brought seriousness and intensity to the set, an atmosphere that was unusual for a show that also trafficked in bathroom humor and physical comedy. “I don’t think there’s a casual bone in his body,” Danson said.After creating a show that seemed to defy the boundaries of a sitcom, blending heady concepts with extreme silliness, Schur felt he had discovered a winning formula that he could deploy in a book. He sold “How to Be Perfect” to Simon & Schuster in early 2020, just before the pandemic arrived and shut down much of the entertainment industry.As its release approaches, Schur is aware that he faces higher expectations than most debut authors. “I wanted the book to be conversational and engaging and funny enough so that people who had watched ‘The Good Place’ or anything else I’ve ever done felt like the same guy was talking to them, and I also wanted anyone who knows anything about philosophy to read it and think, like, hey, not bad,” he said.He’s somewhat reassured by the fact that “The Good Place” was so well received, suggesting that there’s an audience for goofy riffs on ethics, and said he’s gotten positive responses from friends and colleagues who loved the show and the dilemmas it raised.“And if they were lying, then that’s their problem,” Schur added, “because they’ve been unethical.” More

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    Paul Carter Harrison, Whose Ideas Shaped Black Theater, Dies at 85

    In his essays and plays, he provided a framework that linked playwrights like August Wilson to African rituals and mythologies.Paul Carter Harrison, a playwright and scholar who in books, essays and award-winning plays provided a theoretical structure for the Black performing arts, linking works by writers like August Wilson to a deeply rooted structure of African ritual and myth, died on Dec. 27 in Atlanta. He was 85.His daughter, Fonteyn Harrison, confirmed the death, at a retirement home, but said the cause had not been determined.In plays like “The Great MacDaddy” and books like “The Drama of the Nommo: Black Theatre in the African Continuum,” both in 1973, Mr. Harrison went beyond the social and political realism of many of his contemporaries, demonstrating how Black American culture is — and, he said, must be — rooted in African tradition, even as it mixed with white, Eurocentric traditions.“The Great MacDaddy,” for example, is on the surface a paraphrased retelling of Virgil’s “Aeneid,” with the hero setting off across the country to find his father’s secret moonshine recipe. But it is also, and more fundamentally, informed by West African myths about a leader being tested — by demons, by departed elders — to prove himself worthy.“He was always interested in what he called the deep structures of Black life,” Sandra Richards, an emerita professor of theater at Northwestern University, said in an interview. “And for him, those deep structures have to do with ritual and myth.”Though “The Great MacDaddy” won him an Obie Award, Mr. Harrison was equally well known, if not better known, for his theoretical work. Starting in the late 1960s, when he was a professor of theater at Howard University in Washington, he strove to give Black theater an intellectual construct akin to what already existed for Greek theater or Shakespeare.His career was, he said in a 2002 interview, “a continuous preoccupation with trying to retrieve out of this particular experience we call the American experience some traces of our Africanness in the work that we do.”He argued that those myths and rituals were then evoked through aspects of performance, like rhythm and body movement — whether onstage, in church or in everyday life.“He talked about Black performance traditions such as Carnival, which are rooted in rhythm, drums and movement,” said Omiyemi (Artisia) Green, a professor of theater and Africana studies at the College of William & Mary. “You see these kind of elements moving in the Black church as well. All of these things, that movement working together with the language working together with the drums, these things conjure the presence of spirit.”Melvin Van Peebles joined the cast onstage when the Classical Theater of Harlem staged his “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” in 2004. Mr. Harrison had helped conceive the show, which was first presented in Sacramento in 1970 and later seen on Broadway.Michael Nagle for The New York TimesMr. Harrison went on to identify and promote those writers and directors who he felt were already engaged in a similar project, among them Melvin Van Peebles, whose Tony-nominated musical “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” Mr. Harrison helped conceive, and especially August Wilson, a close friend and intellectual compatriot, whose work he believed came closest to aligning contemporary Black arts with its African roots.“More so that anyone else, Paul Carter Harrison was intimately familiar with what was in August Wilson’s toolbox,” Sandra L. Shannon, an emerita professor of English at Howard and the president of the August Wilson Society, said in an interview.Mr. Harrison wrote a series of anthologies highlighting the work of like-minded playwrights and scholars. And while never combative, he could be vocal in his criticism of Black playwrights and directors he felt were operating too close to the white idiom.“African American art runs the risk of losing its uniqueness and soulfulness if it fails to relate the past to the present,” he wrote in “Kuntu Drama: Plays of the African Continuum” (1974).The problem, he argued, was that the Black theater struggled within the confines of the larger, white-dominated culture industry, which tended to ignore authentic expressions of African cultural forms while pouring money on sanitized tellings of the African American experience.To make room, he supported Black theater groups like the New Federal Theater and the Negro Ensemble Company, and he mentored actors and scholars who he felt understood his vision, among them the actress Phylicia Rashad, who studied under him at Howard, and Talvin Wilks, a professor of theater at the University of Minnesota.Mr. Harrison mentored actors and scholars who he felt understood his vision, among them the actress Phylicia Rashad, who studied under him at Howard University.Elijah Nouvelage/Invision, via Associated Press“He was essential in building those relationships and those connections, and was always trying to affirm an understanding of the lineage and the role that any generation could play inside of that,” Professor Wilks said. “He showed that we were all connected through these African diasporic traditions and connections, whether we understood that or not.”Paul Carter Harrison was born on March 1, 1936, in Manhattan. When he was 7, his father, Paul Randolph Harrison, died. His mother, Thelma Inez (Carter) Harrison, worked for the New York City government.He fell in love with the theater early, taking in plays by Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill. But while he admired those white playwrights, he said, they left him cold. More compelling for him were the rhythms of gospel music, storefront chatter and Black political rhetoric, through all of which ran what he called a “mythopoetic” thread unspooled over centuries.He enrolled in New York University, having already fallen in love with the jazz clubs around its Greenwich Village campus. But when he decided to pursue a career in psychology, he transferred to Indiana University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1957.He returned to New York to get a doctorate in psychology at the New School for Social Research. He completed a master’s degree in 1962, but by then he had rediscovered his love of theater, and took a year off to write.He moved to Spain, then the Netherlands, where he fell in with a circle of writers and artists, including the actress Ria Vroemen, whom he married in 1963. They separated in 1968 and later divorced.Along with his daughter, he is survived by his second wife, Wanda Malone, and a grandson.Mr. Harrison was prolific, writing plays, essays and movie scripts, and in 1968 Howard invited him to join its theater department. He arrived for his interview just days after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which set off unrest, including looting and burning, on the streets just outside the university’s gates.Inside them, he found a student body already putting the heady ideas of Black thinkers like Stokely Carmichael and Amiri Baraka into action. The Black Arts Movement was transforming wide swaths of literature and performance, and Mr. Harrison was eager to be a part.Inspired, he began writing essays that tried to give an intellectual framework to what he was seeing onstage. Already well versed in European traditions, he explored African myths and rituals, identified their vitality in art forms like jazz, and advocated for a new generation of artists to embed them within their own work.He also shook up the Howard theater scene. The department, he said in a 2002 interview, had mostly put on plays by white writers. He insisted on replacing classical works with plays by Black writers, including himself — a position that soon brought him in conflict with the department chair.Mr. Harrison quit in 1970 and planned to return to Europe. But he received an offer to teach at California State University, Sacramento, a job that would get him close to the vibrant Black arts scene in the Bay Area, and he accepted.He later taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and at Columbia College Chicago, where he remained until he retired in 2002.By then, Mr. Harrison had become something of an intellectual father figure for a generation of Black writers, directors and performers, who flocked to hear him speak. Unlike them, however, he shunned the spotlight, preferring to be known through his work.“I’ve never been an actor,” he said in a 1997 interview. “I’m principally a playwright. I like anonymity. I’m a good deal more reserved.” More

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    John Bowman, Comedy Writer With a Knack for Crossing Over, Dies at 64

    A white writer who left a corporate job, he became known for working on series with Black stars like Keenen Ivory Wayans and Martin Lawrence.John Bowman, a white television comedy writer and producer who left the corporate world to find success on Black-centered shows like “In Living Color” and “Martin,” died on Dec. 28 at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 64.His wife, Shannon Gaughan Bowman, said the cause was dilated cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscle.Mr. Bowman’s work consisted primarily of writing for and running comedy series. But he also made an important contribution later in his career as a labor leader, helping unionized TV and movie writers get a cut of streaming revenues long before services like Netflix and Hulu changed viewing habits and grabbed tens of millions of subscribers.Mr. Bowman had been a writer on “Saturday Night Live,” as had his wife, when he joined the staff of the Fox sketch show “In Living Color” in 1990.“In Living Color,” created by the Black comedian and actor Keenen Ivory Wayans, brought an African American hip-hop sensibility to network television. Mr. Bowman was one of the show’s first white writers and became head writer in its second season.“He got Keenen, and Keenen got him,” Ms. Gaughan Bowman said in a phone interview.Mr. Bowman had said that Mr. Wayans did not want his show’s writers to bring an overtly political or racial point of view to their work.“Sometimes the white writers would come up with a hard-hitting thing that took a racial attitude,” Mr. Bowman was quoted as saying in the book “Homey Don’t Play That! The Story of ‘In Living Color’ and the Black Comedy Revolution” (2018), by David Peisner, “and Keenen would say, ‘No, no. That may be politically correct but it’s not funny. All you’re doing is trying to incite people, you’re not trying to make them laugh.’”Among the more memorable “In Living Color” sketches Mr. Bowman worked on was “Men on Football,” part a live episode that Fox used to counterprogram against the Super Bowl halftime show in 1992. The sketch, a variation on the regular feature “Men on Film,” featured Mr. Wayans and David Alan Grier as flamboyantly gay reviewers playfully employing double and triple entendres to discuss football.Later that year, Mr. Bowman left “In Living Color” to create “Martin,” also for Fox, with Martin Lawrence and Topper Carew. The show gave Mr. Lawrence, who played a talk-show host in Detroit, a showcase for the arrogant but goofy persona he had perfected as a stand-up comedian.Keenen Ivory Wayans, left, and Damon Wayans in “Do-It-Yourself Milli Vanilli Kit,” a sketch from the first season of “In Living Color.” Mr. Bowman was one of the show’s first white writers and became head writer in its second season.20th Century Fox/Courtesy Everett CollectionMr. Bowman, who was the showrunner for the series, “understood my vision,” Mr. Lawrence said in a statement after Mr. Bowman’s death, adding, “There wasn’t anything too big or too small that could faze him, which made working together a great experience.”Mr. Bowman recalled that Fox’s censors were tough on “Martin” in its first season, which began in the fall of 1992, and that the show suffered for it.“The language on this show is more uncompromisingly Black than it is on any other show,” he told Entertainment Weekly that year. “But you find yourself in the most absurd discussions with censors. I think we’re all frustrated.”Mr. Bowman tapped into his time on “In Living Color” when he teamed with Matt Wickline to create “The Show,” a short-lived 1996 sitcom about a white writer working on a Black series. He was later the showrunner for two other series with Black stars: “The Hughleys,” with D.L.Hughley, and “Cedric the Entertainer Presents,” of which he was also a creator.Ms. Gaughan Bowman said that her husband “liked Black comedy and culture.”“He liked the way Black comedians used language,” she added. “He didn’t want to run ‘Everybody Loves Raymond.’”John Frederick Bowman was born on Sept. 28, 1957, in Milwaukee. His father, William, was a lawyer, and his mother, Loretta (Murphy) Bowman, was a homemaker.White attending Harvard as an undergraduate, Mr. Bowman was an editor at The Harvard Lampoon. He graduated from Harvard Business School in 1985 and became an executive at PepsiCo, based in Purchase, N.Y., before deciding that what he really wanted to do was work in comedy.At the time, his wife was writing for “Saturday Night Live.”“I told Jim that my husband wasn’t happy at PepsiCo and he wanted to do this,” Ms. Gaughan Bowman said, referring to Jim Downey, the longtime “S.N.L.” head writer.It was a big leap from a corporate job to the “S.N.L.” writers’ room, but Mr. Downey, a former president of The Lampoon, had mined the magazine for writers and was familiar with Mr. Bowman through his writing and through mutual friends. He asked Mr. Bowman to submit sketches; he was hired a year later.“He had the best dry sense of humor of almost anyone I’ve ever worked with,” Mr. Downey said by phone. In his only season with the show, Mr. Bowman shared a 1989 Emmy Award with the rest of the writing staff.He went on to be the showrunner in the mid-1990s for “Murphy Brown,” starring Candice Bergen.In addition to his wife, Mr. Bowman is survived by his daughter, Courtney Bowman Brady; his sons, Nicholas, Alec, Jesse and John Jr.; a sister, Susan Bowman; and two brothers, William and James.Mr. Bowman, center, leaving the Writers Guild of America West offices in Beverly Hills, Calif., in 2008 after voting to end a strike by Hollywood writers. He was chairman of the union’s negotiating committee.David McNew/Getty ImagesFrom 2007 to 2008 — when he was working on his final series, “Frank TV,” starring the impressionist Frank Caliendo — Mr. Bowman was chairman of the negotiating committee of the Writers Guild of America West during its 100-day strike against TV and movie producers. During the strike, he talked individually to top studio executives about the union’s position on giving writers a percentage of revenues from what would come to be called streaming — a demand that was ultimately met in a deal struck with production companies.“A lot of it was explaining to people like Les Moonves” — then the chief executive of CBS — “that if they didn’t make money, they didn’t have to pay us anything,” Patric Verrone, who was the writers guild’s president at the time, said in an interview. Referring to Mr. Bowman, he added: “He was a rock. We stood on him and when we needed him, we threw him at things.”Mr. Bowman later taught comedy writing at the University of Southern California. More

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    Finding Joy Through Art at the End of the World in ‘Station Eleven’

    Emily St. John Mandel talks about the pandemic novel she wrote years before Covid-19 and the HBO Max adaptation that some viewers have found oddly life-affirming.There’s a scene in Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 pandemic novel “Station Eleven” when people stranded inside a Midwestern airport realize that no one is coming to save them, because nearly everyone else is dead.One character, clinging to hope that the crisis will pass, says, “I can’t wait till things get back to normal,” a sentiment that feels depressingly familiar two years into the pandemic.One might imagine that a story about a devastating viral outbreak would be a hard sell right now. Instead, to Mandel’s surprise, readers — and more recently, viewers — seem to be finding solace in her post-apocalyptic world, where traumatized survivors take comfort from art, music and friendships with strangers.“There’s something inherently hopeful in that message, just that life goes on,” Mandel said in an interview on Wednesday.“Station Eleven” sales jumped in 2020 and 2021 and have now surpassed 1 million copies. Last month, HBO Max began airing a 10-episode limited series based on the novel, which was adapted by Patrick Somerville and concludes on Thursday. Some viewers have found the show to be oddly life-affirming, despite its premise that billions died from a respiratory illness with a 99 percent fatality rate. James Poniewozik, the chief television critic for the Times, called it “the most uplifting show about life after the end of the world that you are likely to see.”Like the novel, the TV series follows a Shakespearean troupe that travels the Great Lakes region performing for survivors, offering hope that art will endure in a world without electricity, plumbing, antibiotics or iPhones. It opens just before the virus sweeps across North America, at a performance where an actor playing King Lear (Gael García Bernal) collapses onstage and dies while a man from the audience, Jeevan Chaudhary, tries to revive him. In the series, Jeevan (Himesh Patel) ends up caring for Kirsten, a young actress in the play (Matilda Lawler), and they quarantine together with his brother Frank (Nabhaan Rizwan) when society abruptly shuts down.The story jumps back and forth between the prepandemic era, the present day, the beginning of the end of the world, and 20 years after the crisis. Kirsten (played in her adult years by Mackenzie Davis) has joined the theater company, a touring caravan putting on productions of “Hamlet” and other Shakespeare plays. On the road, she meets a prophet she shares a strange connection with — an obsession with an obscure graphic novel about a spaceman named Dr. Eleven.Ahead of the series finale, Mandel spoke to the Times about why the story is resonating with Covid-weary audiences, her unease with being treated as a pandemic prophet and why she feels hope for a post-apocalyptic world. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Himesh Patel in “Station Eleven.”Ian Watson/HBO MaxIt must have been weird to publish a pandemic novel set in the near future and then see a pandemic arrive. What was it like watching this unfold?I really predicted nothing. When you research the history of pandemics, as I did for “Station Eleven,” what becomes really clear is that there will always be another pandemic. We didn’t see this one coming because it’s been about 100 years since the last one in this part of the world, but it was always going to happen.You were also in the odd position of being held up as a cultural expert on the meaning of pandemics. What was that like?It was incredibly disorienting and surreal. At the same time, that was everybody’s life in March 2020 when this thing hit. I don’t know if it was actually that much stranger for me. What did feel really kind of odd and uncomfortable was all of a sudden I started getting all of these invitations to write op-eds about the pandemic. It felt a little bit gross, like I was using the pandemic as a marketing opportunity. That was something that I pushed back on.One of the themes in “Station Eleven” is the idea that art can give life meaning in times of catastrophe. Has that been true for you and do you see evidence of it being true on a broader cultural scale?Yes, absolutely. That’s been really heartening. When I look back to the spring of 2020, when we didn’t really know that much about the virus, I just remember being scared to go anywhere or do anything. Books were a kind of transport in that period for me, just being able to escape from the confines of my apartment, basically, by reading. It really meant a lot to me, and I think that is something that the show captures really beautifully. There’s a traveling symphony, but then also there’s that incredible moment in episode seven where the Frank character breaks into a rap song.How did you feel about some of the changes the show made?The show deepened the story in a lot of really interesting ways. There are some things they did that I really love, that I felt took ideas that I suggested in the book and carried them further, like the importance of “Hamlet” in the story. In my book, it was important that they perform Shakespeare, but in the series, Shakespeare is integrated into the plot in this really deep way that I feel like I only scratched the surface of in the book.I love what the series did with the Jeevan character, where in the book I could never really figure out how to integrate him with the other characters without it seeming a little bit too forced, really coincidental. I love that they just have Kirsten go back to Frank’s place with him. That completely solved that problem. It’s just such a wonderful emotional architecture for the story.What they really did beautifully was capture the joy in the book. It is a post-apocalyptic world, but something that I thought about a lot when I was writing the book was how beautiful that world would be. I was just imagining trees and grass, and flowers overtaking our structures. I thought of the beauty of that world, but also the joy. This is a group of people who travel together because they love playing music together and doing Shakespeare, and there is real joy in that.Another significant change is the character of Tyler, the prophet, who has a totally different fate in the book. What did you make of how they developed that character?There’s something depressingly familiar about the prophet that I wrote, because that’s the only kind of prophet I’d really encountered, in news stories and reading. I based my prophet off David Koresh and the Branch Davidians in Texas. There’s something really kind of original and interesting about the version of the prophet in the series. He’s a much more sympathetic character.Mackenzie Davis, center, stars in “Station Eleven” as an actor in a post-apocalyptic theater troupe.Ian Watson/HBO MaxHow involved were you with this show?I texted sometimes with Patrick Somerville. He cleared a lot of the major changes with me, which I really appreciated. I was not particularly involved once the show started shooting. I never visited the set because of Covid. So, I was kind of distant from the entire thing, which it’s unfortunate. I wish I could have gone there.The show was just beginning production when the pandemic hit. Was there ever a concern that viewers would balk at the premise?My assumption, and I’ve seen this play out on social media, was that some people would embrace it and some people are just too traumatized. I would say for anybody who’s on the fence about the show, that the first episode is the hardest to watch, or it was for me, anyway. That experience of dread as the pandemic washes over your entire society, that’s something that we’re just way too familiar with. It is also a brilliant episode. If you can get past your discomfort for that, I think it’s a more joyful show than people who are hesitant about it might imagine it to be.A lot of people are finding the show to be cathartic. Why do you think people are comforted by the novel and the show?There’s something in the idea that you can lose an entire world, but all of the society that you take for granted every day can disappear in the course of a pandemic. But there is life afterward, and there’s joy afterward, and a lot of things that are worth living for in the aftermath.In the novel and show, history is bifurcated into Before and After, and it’s interesting to think about what cultural shifts will endure from the pandemic.What’s weird is how quickly your boundaries fall. I had this wonderful experience last month. I got to meet all these “Station Eleven” actors and producers at a lunch, and then there was a screening later. It was my first time socializing indoors without masks in two years. I was like, OK, I’m going to do this. I’ve been PCR tested. I’m double-vaxxed, et cetera. It’s fine. I was like, but I’m not going to shake hands or hug anybody. I hugged everybody. More

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    Clare Barron on ‘Shhhh’ and How Playwriting Is Her ‘Kink of Exhibitionism’

    The playwright says her semi-autobiographical works, including her new play for Atlantic Theater Company, help to provide a measure of clarity about painful experiences.In the early months of the pandemic, the playwright Clare Barron published an essay titled “Not Writing,” which she accompanied with photographs of her cats, empty La Croix cans and unwashed laundry. “I haven’t written a play in four years,” she wrote. “I don’t know if I’ll write a play ever again. Who cares.”On Friday, the Atlantic Theater Company will premiere Barron’s new play, “Shhhh,” which she also directs and stars in. It’s not new new — Barron, 35, wrote it in 2016. But like all of her work — which includes “Baby Screams Miracle,” “Dirty Crusty,” “I’ll Never Love Again,” the Obie-winning “You Got Older” and the Pulitzer-nominated “Dance Nation” — it feels new: vibrating, visceral, almost worryingly alive.Part drama, part confession, part incantation, “Shhhh” tells the story of Shareen (Barron), a writer with a mysterious illness, and her sister, Sally (Constance Shulman), a postal worker who also makes A.S.M.R. videos and hosts meditation rituals. (The play refers to this character as Witchy Witch.) It returns to the themes and ideas that fascinate Barron: power, pleasure, desire, pain and all of the very weird things that a body can do. “It’s probably why I’m a theater artist,” Barron said, “to get to keep playing with the body in public.”In a conference room at the Atlantic’s offices in Chelsea, Barron — masked, fleeced, unguarded — discussed writing, not writing and creating such passionately personal work. “It’s not like I love it,” she said. “It makes me sick to my stomach. But then I kind of want to do it anyway.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Why did you want to publish “Not Writing”?I’ve always had a little bit of impostor syndrome and shame around not being a daily writer. My romantic image of a writer was like, they get up at 5 a.m., they put the coffee on, they work for three hours and take a break for breakfast — that kind of thing. I just have never wanted to write every day. I want to go out and do things and see people and have experiences. I’ve always felt like, “Oh, am I a fake writer? Am I not a real writer?” I have to wait for plays to incubate inside of me. Sometimes that means four come out in two years. Sometimes that means one comes out in seven years.I started to find success as a playwright in my late 20s, and my mental health was just completely plummeting. I got diagnosed as bipolar right before the 2016 election. And I just haven’t been able to write sometimes because of mental health. It is really freaky when everyone’s expecting you to function at a really high level. And you’re like, “I can’t feed myself right now. I can’t shower myself right now.” I’m not going to always be able to be functional, and I’m not going to always be able to be efficient, and I’m not going to always be able to be productive, and I’m just going to have to make peace with that.Barron at the Atlantic’s Linda Gross Theater. She is also directing and starring in her new play.Tonje Thilesen for The New York TimesDo you think you would have been diagnosed earlier if you weren’t working in theater?Being a theater artist delayed my diagnosis 100 percent, because it is such a weird lifestyle. You’re allowed to be really emotional. When you’re crying for no reason, theater people are great! And the schedule’s really off and on. So it actually works really well with a manic burst.Did you worry about what treatment would do to your process? I understand that even while you haven’t written plays, you have kept writing, mostly pilots for television.Limiting your creative ability or even your creative desire is a really common fear for anyone looking to go on psychiatric medication. I had that fear. And as years went by and I didn’t write new plays, it mounted. I was doing writing as a job. But what I wasn’t able to do was inspiration, personal revelation. I got a little freaked out, like, “Oh, did I lose it?” But being able to be in a TV writers’ room and still produce episodes was really helpful.How did you take care of yourself during the pandemic?Everyone had a different trial. I was single and lived alone. So what I was struggling with was no in-person social support, and just being really isolated. It just was incredibly lonely. I took a ton of baths. I drank a ton. I’d started doing craft projects. Everything from painting rocks to felting. I felted these little stuffed animal creatures.You wrote “Shhhh” in 2016. I remember you describing it in 2019 as a #MeToo play.I never knew how to talk about this play. So I would try out different tag lines. It’s a little bit of a collage play; it’s a little bit of a spell. It is a play about sexual assault, but very, very buried and strange. It’s a play about rape culture, but slightly more casually.When did you know that you wanted to direct it? And that you wanted to play Shareen?You’re talking to me right before we go into tech [rehearsals]. So I’m like, “What am I doing? This was a huge mistake.” I’ve been interested in directing for a while, and I’ve experimented with it a bit. The acting thing came separate. I wrote the play because I was sexually assaulted, but I was not able to say it. It was therapy for me to write this play. And that character, Shareen, is so me, everything that happens to her. It’s not autobiographical, but it’s in my skin and in my bones. We did this reading at my agent’s office where I just read it, and it just felt right and easy. Now it feels hard and scary. But in that moment, it felt like the right choice.“Shhhh” reminded me of one of your earliest plays, “Dirty Crusty,” and its fascination with the body as a site of both pleasure and disgust.I can’t quite get over that. Theater is the body; it is the body in front of other bodies. I like the body to be vulnerable onstage, present onstage, seen onstage, animal onstage — those are all things that turn me on. Growing up in a Christian community and feeling like I wanted to save my virginity until I was married, it took me forever to undo that knot and not feel like I was going to go to hell if I had sex. There’s something, like, compulsive in my theater work where I just keep trying to undo that knot and do things onstage that I never thought I would do. And when I finally did have sex, I just remember my utter shock when I realized that, like, sex was flesh and not magic.Like most of your plays, “Shhhh” has some intimate scenes. Has the pandemic influenced that staging?There’s also spitting and eating and sharing food. All of that feels really different now. In our rehearsal process, we’ve been doing sex scenes in masks. In some ways, it’s nice. There’s an added layer of care and sensitivity. It might feel a little wild to be doing it in front of an audience.There’s magic in this play — incantation, ritual. Is magic something you believe in?I think I believe in magic. I believe in things more than I can understand. Divine coincidence, chanting. Yeah, I do believe in magic. I play with that, too, because theater does feel like a ritual. It’s a little bit like, what can we conjure?You tend to write from a personal place. Where does autobiography end and art take over?Every single play that I’ve ever written starts with something that happened in my life that was super painful. Maybe this is my kink of exhibitionism: I get off on writing about these things super baldly. When a play goes well, I think of it almost as a yeast starter. When you work with the materials, it just changes. But I’m kind of shameless about it. “I’ll Never Love Again” is literally my diary. It’s not even hidden, which is why I don’t get upset when people are like, “Oh, I think this is autobiographical.” Because that’s not a bad word to me. I feel like I’m exposing myself over and over again, hoping to have some kind of like clarity.Is there a fear that you’ll run out of material?I don’t think I’m afraid of that. I just think I might have to wait for it. Life is just so painful and throws you so many curveballs, there always is another thing to write about. It’ll be a blessed thing if I have nothing to write about. More

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    Into the Belly of the Whale With Sjón

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Some years back, an earthquake broke the chimney off the novelist Sjón’s writing hut. He was in the bathtub when it hit — he clung to the tub’s edges as it bucked and jerked, sloshing water onto the floor. This was unpleasant but not terribly strange. Iceland is one of the most geologically volatile patches of land on Earth — it sits (like Hawaii) on top of a geothermal hot spot but also (unlike Hawaii) on top of a seam where two tectonic plates are pulling apart. The threshold between inside and outside is very thin. You never know when some mysterious force — earthquake, geyser, volcano — will come bursting out of the middle of the planet into your everyday life.What made this earthquake unusual, in Sjón’s experience, were the whales. In the weeks following the tremors, whales started beaching themselves all over Iceland’s South Coast. The shock waves, he speculates, might have thrown off the animals’ navigation systems. One day, on a writing break, Sjón wandered down to the ocean and discovered that a whale had beached itself just a few minutes from his front door.“What kind of whale?” I asked.“I don’t know the species,” he said. “A medium-sized whale?”“How big is medium? Like the size of a car?”“No no no,” Sjón said.“The size of a dolphin?”“Much bigger!” he said. “The size of a bus.”Well, the bus-size whale died on the beach. The smell, Sjón says, was incredible. Day after day, week after week, he would take writing breaks to stand by the ocean and watch the flocks of seabirds working on the carcass. The biggest birds ate first. Then the smaller birds moved in. Finally, Sjón went in, too. He entered that rotten world — bone, blubber, organs, gristle — and saw, sticking up from the mess, like an elegant carving, a whole rib, tapered and curving, roughly the length of his arm. He grabbed the bone with both hands. It was rank and slippery. He yanked and twisted until, with much difficulty, he was able to wrestle it free.Elsewhere in the carcass, Sjón noticed a shoulder blade — a gorgeous flat half-disc that looked like the head of an ancient ax. With a little more work, he managed to extract that too. By the time Sjón made it back to his writing hut, he was covered in death-slime. He had to strip off his clothes before he went inside. He left the whale bones out in the garden. It took the harshness of Iceland three full years to scrub them clean.Sjón was telling me this story in the little cottage where he writes his books: an old fisherman’s house plated with black corrugated steel. (Icelandic houses tend to wear armor to survive the winters.) In person, Sjón is a perfect avatar of the International Man of Letters: thick black glasses, tweed hat, faint graying goatee. His manner is gentle, thoughtful and unfailingly polite. He speaks fluent English with a strong Icelandic accent. That afternoon, he appeared to be wearing, over his button-up shirt, two sweaters — a cardigan over another cardigan. Trying to imagine this man wrestling bones out of a whale carcass was absurd.But Sjón had proof. He pointed to the wall behind us. “This is the rib,” he said.It hung there, like the back end of a set of parentheses.He pointed to the opposite wall. “And this is the shoulder.”There it was, hovering like a spaceship over the bookshelf.“So if you’re here” — now Sjón gestured to the table itself — “then you’re in the belly of the whale. So I sit here and write.”He smiled, in a way that his books sometimes seem to smile — a way that suggests something funny might have happened, but also possibly not, and anyway let’s move on to whatever story is coming next.The belly of the whale, in traditional storytelling, is a place of divine transformation, a cave filled with dark magic. This makes it the perfect place for Sjón to do his writing. His wide-ranging work — nine novels, two films, numerous poetry collections, dozens of song lyrics for his close friend Björk — carries a whiff of the unreal. The novels often feature bizarre events, usually involving sudden transformations: One fox becomes four foxes, a stamp collector turns into a werewolf, a young man morphs into a black butterfly. Like Iceland itself, Sjón’s books are simultaneously tiny and huge, weird and normal, ancient and modern. Reading them feels like listening to that story of the beached whale: a wild invention that is actually a straight-faced confession. His books dance — with light, quick steps, never breaking eye contact — all over the line between the mythic and the mundane.‘His fiction never seems to break into a sweat, yet it takes you a long, long way.’Sjón’s fiction has long been celebrated in Europe. The books started appearing in English in 2011, and soon they were drawing high-profile raves. “Every now and then a writer changes the whole map of literature inside my head,” A.S. Byatt wrote in The New York Review of Books. Although Sjón has not quite become an international literary Nordic megabrand, à la Karl Ove Knausgaard or Stieg Larsson, he has amassed a deep and passionate following, especially among other novelists.“I am amazed he’s not better known than he is,” Hari Kunzru told me. “I thought he was going to turn into something like the Bolaño cult.” Kunzru said that he admires both Sjón’s erudition — his novels cover such diverse subjects as whaling, alchemy and the history of cinema — and the way he folds that deep knowledge into swift, effortless stories.David Mitchell, another fan, told me via email that he admires Sjón for his “ticklish, full-moon sense of humor” and the poetic simplicity of his style: “spaciousness and absence” that make him think of Taoism. What Sjón leaves out of his work, Mitchell wrote, is as powerful as what he puts in. “His fiction never seems to break into a sweat, yet it takes you a long, long way.”The type of wild transformation Sjón loves to write about — all these creatures unpredictably changing states — also applies to his own work. From book to book, he radically varies his style, setting and subject matter. He can write a slim fable about a 19th-century fox hunt (“The Blue Fox”) or a rolling monologue by a 17th-century alchemist (“From the Mouth of the Whale”) or a multigenre epic about the Holocaust, nuclear explosions and DNA (“CoDex 1962”). Sjón’s new novel, “Red Milk,” is a clinically realistic portrait of a young neo-Nazi. And yet, despite its range, the writing is always recognizably Sjón.When talking about his work, Sjón rejects the word “fantastic.” Fantastic, he says, implies unreality. Even the most improbable events in his books, he argues, are not unreal — they grow from the soil of Icelandic history, and they are real for his characters, even if they happen only in their minds, as misperceptions or hallucinations. Instead, Sjón prefers the word “marvelous.” His work, and his country, are full of marvels: strange things that emerge and flow, all the time, over the bedrock of reality. The marvelous is all around us, he insists. We just need the vision to see it.Sjón’s full name is Sigurjón Birgir Sigurdsson — a cascade of soft G’s and rolling R’s that sounds, when he says it, like a secret liquid song, sung deep in his throat, to a shy baby horse. He was born in 1962, into a Reykjavík that was, in many ways, still a village: small, dull, remote, conservative, homogeneous. Iceland felt like the edge of the world, and Sjón grew up on the edge of that edge. He was the only child of a single mother, and they moved, when he was 10, into a freshly poured neighborhood on the outskirts of the city called Breidholt. (By the miniature standards of Reykjavík, outskirts means about a 10-minute drive from downtown.) Breidholt was planned housing: a big complex of Brutalist concrete apartment blocks standing alone in a muddy wasteland. Every time it rained, the parking lot turned into a brown lake. And yet that wasteland was surrounded by ancient Icelandic beauty: moors, trees, birds, a river full of leaping salmon. Sjón often thinks about this juxtaposition: those two vastly different worlds, which he toggled between at will. The fluidity of the landscape, he says, helped create a similar fluidity in his imagination.As a boy, Sjón was precocious, hungry for world culture. He remembers watching “Mary Poppins” at age 4 and being shocked by an uncanny moment at the end when her umbrella handle, shaped like a parrot, suddenly opens its beak and speaks. (“I still haven’t recovered,” he says.) As a teenager, Sjón fell in love with David Bowie, and for years he studied Bowie’s interviews like syllabuses, tracking down all the artists he mentioned, educating himself about international books and music. Finally, he discovered Surrealism. It felt exactly right: discordant realities stacked on top of each other without explanation or transition or apology. Sjón became obsessed — a Surrealist evangelist. This is when he adopted the pen name Sjón. It was a perfect bit of literary branding: his given name, Sigurjón, with the middle extracted. In Icelandic, sjón means “vision.”Iceland, in the 1970s, was a strange place to be a teenager, especially one with artistic ambitions. Reykjavík, the country’s only real city, had two coffee shops and two hotels. Sjón told me that the most exciting event, for young people, was a ritual known as “Hallaerisplanid” — a word that translates, roughly, as “Hardship Square” or, more colorfully, “the Cringe Zone.” Every weekend, huge masses of teenagers would mob the city’s shabby little central plaza, then walk around for hours in loud, rowdy packs, looping over and over through the narrow downtown streets. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, on a visit to Reykjavík, watched these thousands of kids from their hotel window with fascination. It would have been a perfectly existentialist spectacle — restless hordes, in the face of a vast nothingness, creating meaning by fiat, through an absurd, defiant, repetitive, arbitrary ritual.For Sjón, the bleakness of Reykjavík was both impossible and ideal. He didn’t have much help, but he was free to become whatever he wanted. So he did. At 16, he self-published his first book of poetry, then sold it to captive audiences on the bus. From his Brutalist apartment building, he wrote grandiose letters to Surrealists all over the world, declaring a new Icelandic front of the movement. His mailbox filled with responses from Japan, Portugal, Brazil, France. Eventually, Sjón got himself invited to visit old Surrealists in Europe. On a stay with André Breton’s widow, in France, he swam in a river and had a visionary experience with a dragonfly: It sat on his shoulder, vibrating its wings, then took off — and in that moment he felt he had been baptized into a new existence.Back in Reykjavík, Sjón helped found a Surrealist group called Medúsa, into which he recruited other ambitious teenagers. One of these recruits was a girl from his neighborhood — a singer who would go on to become, by the end of the 20th century, probably the most famous Icelander in the world. Björk was a musical prodigy; she got her first record deal at age 11, after a song she performed for a school recital was broadcast on Iceland’s only radio station. She met Sjón when she was 17, when he came into the French hot-chocolate shop where she worked downtown. Björk told me in an email that she was, at the time, a “super introvert.” She and Sjón formed a loud, stunty two-person band called Rocka Rocka Drum — “a liberating alter ego thing” for each of them, she remembers.The members of Medúsa made noise all over Reykjavík. They argued about literature and put on art shows in a garage and flung themselves into bohemian high jinks. One time, all the Surrealists got drunk on absinthe and proceeded to walk around Reykjavík entirely on the roofs of parked cars — a night that ended at a popular club, where Sjón bit a bouncer on the thigh, then recited André Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism” while lying face down in a police car. The Surrealists considered it a great victory when they were denounced, in newspapers, by Iceland’s conservative literary establishment. In one of the great thrills of his life, Sjón once heard himself attacked personally, on the radio, while he was riding the bus. Björk found all of this exhilarating. “It was,” she told me, “like being absorbed into a gorgeous D.I.Y. organic university: extreme fertility!”This wild artistic ferment yielded not only Sjón’s literary career but also the Sugarcubes — the alternative-rock group, fronted by Björk, that became Iceland’s first international breakout success. Although Sjón was not an official member, he sometimes joined the group on tour, dancing wildly onstage under the name Johnny Triumph. (This was another play on his name: Sigurjón can be translated as “Victory John.”) In the 1990s, when Björk began her solo career, she turned to Sjón for help writing lyrics. And so his words, set to her music, began to circle the world. “I’m a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl,” Björk sings at the beginning of her 1997 song “Bachelorette” — an image that would work equally well in one of Sjón’s novels. In 2001, Björk and Sjón were nominated for an Oscar for a song they wrote for the Lars von Trier film “Dancer in the Dark.” (Björk showed up to the ceremony wearing her famous swan dress.) In 2004, Björk performed their song “Oceania” at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Athens.Sjón (left) performing as Johnny Triumph with the Sugarcubes in November 1987.Sigurdur Mar Halldórsson/Reykjavík Museum of PhotographySjón’s lyrics, Björk told me, have a poetic quality that is very different from her own. Certain lines, she said, feel incredible in her mouth, even after decades of performing them. Many of his sentences, as she put it, “feel like a whole universe every time I say them.”Today Sjón lives in central Reykjavík, just a couple of minutes away from Björk, in a leafy neighborhood famous for its cats. (Sjón has a cat named Reverend Markus — please trust me that I do not have nearly the space or time to tell you its full story here.) At 59, he lives a quiet life with his wife, an opera singer named Ásgerdur. They have two grown children, a photographer and a producer of Icelandic rap.One afternoon, I met Sjón near his house. A big orange cat happened to be sprawling in the middle of the sidewalk. Sjón stopped to pet it, and as he did so, he poured out a soft stream of affectionate Icelandic — vowels stretching and plunging and leaping, R’s rolling like creekwater over stones. The cat flopped onto its back, meowing. I listened, fascinated, understanding nothing.The Icelandic language, in which Sjón writes, is notoriously difficult. It is spoken by just over 350,000 people — something like the population of Anaheim, Calif. (French, by comparison, is spoken fluently by around 300 million, English by 1.35 billion.) The language has long been a point of pride for Icelanders — a kind of sacred national heritage site that lives in their mouths. In many ways, the language is the culture. Modern Icelandic is often spoken of as a linguistic time capsule — a cryogenically frozen version of the language the first settlers of Iceland spoke 1,200 years ago, when they landed on this island populated by only birds and arctic foxes. Without too much trouble, Icelanders can still read the great sagas written 800 years ago. Much energy and political capital has gone into freezing the language in place, trying to keep it pure: rejecting loan words, mandating public signage, upholding traditional naming conventions. I tried, before my trip, to teach myself Icelandic using an app on my phone. But I gave up almost immediately.Sjón’s longtime English translator, Victoria Cribb, told me that Icelandic is difficult for many reasons. Its words combine easily, playfully, to become new words; its nouns shift form depending on their position in a sentence. “It means you can get every single word slightly wrong,” Cribb told me. “The chances for social embarrassment are enormous.”Sjón, however, tends to cheerfully play all of this down. Throughout our two days together, he insisted, again and again, that his native language was not so special. Like much about Iceland, he says, the uniqueness of Icelandic has been fetishized, exaggerated.We sat outside at a small cafe. Sjón pointed across the street to a bus stop, one side of which was covered by an ad for Honey Nut Cheerios. I recognized the imagery — cartoon bee, wooden dipper drenched in honey — but the text was completely alien. Letters, hatched with odd lines, clustered together into incomprehensible shapes.Sjón read the ad copy aloud: “Hafdu pad gott alla vikuna!” “Hafdu,” he said. “ ‘Have.’ Pad — OK, ‘that,’ you know.” He went on like this, word by word, with the patience of a kindergarten teacher, until he had decoded the whole message for me. “Have that good all week.” The Honey Nut Cheerios ad, Sjón said, may as well have been written in English. “You should say to your friends in the States, ‘Go to Iceland — you speak the language anyway,’” he said.Over the course of our time together, Sjón would do this many times. He translated the Icelandic on road signs and billboards and menus and credit-card machines — always pointing out that much of what struck me as strange was, in fact, secretly familiar.This, I came to understand, is typical Sjón. He insists, always, on interconnections, cross-pollinations, porous borders between overlapping worlds. He is an enthusiastic mixer. The impulse, for him, goes far beyond language. It applies to every aspect of human culture: art, food, dance, film, music, literary genres.And even beyond all that, it is a moral position, a deliberate challenge to one of the great historical pillars of Icelandic identity: the notion that Iceland is a pure nation — culturally, ecologically, linguistically, genetically.Or, as Sjón refers to it, “this purity nonsense.”“It’s quite ingrained in Icelandic culture,” he told me. As a child, Sjon says, he was taught to revere Iceland’s unique and glorious history, its people’s inherent goodness, the ancient sanctity of its language and the special native genius of the sagas — the 13th-century texts that helped preserve Scandinavian lore (including Norse mythology) that otherwise would have been lost forever.Most of this, Sjón says, was a historical fantasy — at best an exaggeration. “So much of what is good in this society is things that were brought here from abroad,” he told me. Iceland, from its inception, was multicultural. It was founded, 1,200 years ago, by a wave of immigrant Scandinavian farmers, along with people from Ireland and the British islands. As skilled sea people, early Icelanders worked hard to maintain contact with the rest of the world. Culture, inevitably, flowed both ways.“Right from the beginning, when the Icelanders start telling stories and writing stories, they are always about this contact with the continent and with world history,” Sjón says. “They’re always connecting themselves with the Norwegian kings, with events taking place in Ireland, with someone going all the way down to Istanbul, or Constantinople, as it was called then — or Mikligardur, as it was called in Icelandic. They had names for all these places, because they had visited them. Moorish Spain. The Mediterranean. They’re everywhere. So when they tell stories, their stories always leave this place and go out into the big world. And they do not only go out into the big physical world, they connect with the big cosmological world of the myths.”The idea of Icelandic purity, Sjón says, is a relatively modern invention: It dates back only about 200 years, to a group of German intellectuals who, obsessed with racial origins, fixated on a category of whiteness that stretched up to Scandinavia. Iceland, in its supposed isolation, was cast as a direct link to that deep ancestral history. (Later, for obvious reasons, the Nazis would be crazy about Iceland.) Although this was largely a pseudoscientific fantasy, it was flattering to Icelanders. Purity, after all, is an excellent brand: It can sell everything from bottled water to dog food to fish oil to nation-states. The purity myth helped to infuse this poor, beleaguered, neglected island — a tiny nation harassed by volcanoes and famines, dominated by its powerful Scandinavian neighbors — with a sense of national pride. In the late 19th century, Icelandic nationalists wielded the purity myth as a weapon against Denmark in the fight for independence. (Iceland officially became a republic, finally, in 1944.)The Iceland Sjón grew up in, he says, was stiflingly bigoted. In the middle of the 20th century, when the United States established a permanent military base near Reykjavík, Iceland allowed it only on the condition that no Black troops would be stationed there. (This ban was not lifted until the 1960s.) During his childhood, Sjón remembers, there were exactly two Black children in the city, and everyone knew who they were. A famous gay musician — the first Icelandic celebrity to come out of the closet — was pelted with snowballs and eventually driven from the country.Things are better now, Sjón says, but not entirely. Iceland’s immigration and citizenship laws remain extremely strict, and resistance to outsiders can be strong. Sjón gets passionate when he talks about this. His gentle demeanor swells with outrage. It angers him on many levels at once.‘I think at the core of the human being, there is an enjoyment of complexity. I think we enjoy things being complex and marvelous.’Kunzru told me that he can still feel, sometimes, the younger version of Sjón lurking — the anarchist surrealist bohemian rebel. “The Sjón we meet now is this urbane gentleman,” he said. “He’s got this tweedy Edwardian thing going on. But he’s still there underneath. There’s a punk.”Sjón’s books — sometimes explicitly, sometimes with playful indirection — are always fighting off the forces of constriction, narrowness, Icelandic exceptionalism. They tend to center outcasts and exiles, characters who don’t fit into dominant norms and are punished accordingly. “Moonstone” tells the story of a queer, dyslexic teenage boy in 1918 Reykjavík. “From the Mouth of the Whale” channels the wild mind of a blasphemous 16th-century scholar sent off to a freezing rock in the middle of the North Atlantic.“One of the things I appreciate about him is that, along with the playfulness, and the lightness of touch, there is a deep moral seriousness,” Cribb told me. “A great anger. It’s decently hidden, but it’s very much there: a moral anger.”When Sjón was a teenager, he learned a shameful family secret. His mother, he writes, “grew up knowing only that her father had been in the news when she was 7 years old because of something so bad that no one in her small fishing village would tell her what it was.” It turned out to be this: During World War II, Sjón’s grandfather lived in Germany, where he was trained as a Nazi spy; he came back to Iceland on a U-boat in 1944 and was arrested for treason. He served a year in prison. Sjón’s uncles, too, were card-carrying members of the Nazi Party.Although Sjón was not close to any of these relatives, he has grappled with that legacy throughout his career. The narrator of his novel “The Whispering Muse,” for instance, is in part a satire of his grandfather: a tedious man who opines, endlessly, about how the Nordic race’s fish-based diet has made it superior to the rest of the world. Sjón shows us that bigotry is, in addition to all its other faults, a crime against storytelling. The narrator is a gasbag, and no one has any interest in his speeches: “I was becoming used to the crew members’ tendency to behave as if everything I said was incomprehensible, to remain silent for just as long as I was speaking, then carry on from where they had left off, treating me like some guano-covered rock that one must steer a course around.”Unlike ancient myths or actual history, nationalist fantasies tend to be flat and static and dull. This is why fascist movements, Sjón says, always have a shelf life. Cultural richness will not be constrained.“I think at the core of the human being, there is an enjoyment of complexity,” he told me. “I think we enjoy things being complex and marvelous. Wherever you go in human culture, at whatever point in history, you can see that culture means complexity.”Sjón’s new novel, “Red Milk,” is his most direct engagement with Nazism. It started when he discovered that a neo-Nazi cell thrived in Reykjavík around the time of his birth. One member, in particular, caught his attention: a young organizer who died of cancer.This was, for Sjón, an irresistible storytelling challenge. “Red Milk” imagines this mysterious neo-Nazi as an ordinary boy named Gunnar Kampen. It follows him from his first memory (a family car trip that buzzes, like all human experiences, with color and life) to his radicalization (“Only white people let the light into themselves,” a woman tells him, holding his hand up to a lamp) to his lonely death on a train. The novel isn’t a satire or a screed. Its style is clinical, provocatively spare — it resists, almost completely, the hallmarks of Sjón’s previous work: the marvelous, the bizarre, the mystical.Too often, Sjón says, we think about fascism and Nazism as extraordinary. In fact, they are the most ordinary things in the world. “Red Milk” captures the pathetic human reality of a boy who, by attaching himself to a poisonous ideology, hopes to make his own small life feel important. (He calls his group the Sovereign Power Movement and names his newsletter, in good Icelandic style, after Thor’s hammer.) The boy’s cancer and his Nazism advance in tandem. Sjón makes us watch, pitilessly, as the richness of a human life gets reduced and reduced and reduced until it finally disappears. As he writes in an afterword: “We must start with what we have in common with such people. Not that I think a proper conversation can ever be had with someone whose ultimate goal is to get rid of you for good. But we can at least show them that we see them for what they are, that we know they come from childhoods fundamentally similar to our own … that a neo-Nazi is no more special than that.”One of the strangest things about Sjón’s fiction is its power of prediction. He seems to be able to summon things, magnetically, across the threshold between reality and imagination. The summer that the earthquake hit, when that whale washed up outside his door, Sjón was about to finish a novel that ends with its narrator in the belly of a whale. Not long after the publication of “Red Milk,” neo-Nazis demonstrated in downtown Reykjavík for the first time in decades. “Moonstone,” maybe my favorite novel, is set in Reykjavík in 1918, during the unlikely confluence of a global pandemic and a volcanic eruption — a situation that recurred, to Sjón’s disbelief, in 2021.In the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, a volcano called Fagradalsfjall unexpectedly erupted — the first eruption in that region in 800 years. It launched spectacular spurts of lava more than 1,000 feet high. People in Sjón’s neighborhood lined up, at night, to watch it like a fireworks show.“It was crazy,” Sjón says. “I thought, OK, now I’m living in the times I described in my novel. For that to happen to an ordinary novelist, not someone who’s working in science fiction — it’s amazing. The novel has completely changed in nature.”Before I left Iceland, I drove over to see the volcano. It was erupting, conveniently, right near the airport. As I walked the hiking trail, alongside the rest of the tourists, I prepared myself to witness, in real life, something sublime — a level of pure natural power I had only ever imagined or watched on screens. My spirit was trembling with a sort of Viking sublime, a Wagner aria of the soul.After about 20 minutes, the path turned — and I stopped, shocked. What I saw was nothing like what I had been expecting. The volcano was no longer visibly erupting. This was the aftermath. The whole valley was filled with, absolutely choking on, a huge black mass of dried lava: a hardened flood. It was brutal and vast and blunt and ugly — majestic, somehow, in its ugliness. It filled the valley the way a tongue fills a mouth. The black rock still steamed in spots, and everything smelled like sulfur, and if you looked in certain crannies you could see an orange glow that made me think of charcoal in a barbecue. It was, in other words, an absolute mess — the biggest mess I have ever seen in my life. There was something slightly embarrassing about it. I had never thought of a volcano like this before. It felt like walking into a ballroom the morning after a decadent party.Some of the tourists were audibly disappointed. They couldn’t believe their bad luck. As a Google review would put it: “No red-hot and flowing lava = not 5 stars.”As I stood there, I couldn’t help thinking of Sjón’s distinction between the fantastic and the marvelous. This volcano was that distinction made real. It was not anything like the fantasy of a volcano we all imagined when we flew to Iceland. It was weirder, dirtier, more complicated. It was a marvel. I put my ear down to the black stone. It was making noise: a hiss, a crackle. Somewhere deep, a force began to click.Sam Anderson is a staff writer for the magazine. His last feature was about the artist Laurie Anderson. Matthieu Gafsou is a Swiss photographer based in Lausanne. In September 2022, he will have a midcareer retrospective at the Pully Museum of Art in the suburbs of Lausanne, along with an exhibition of new work, titled “Vivants.” More

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    The Vitality of Black Criticism

    Before his death, Greg Tate spoke with four other critics at the Pop Conference about the need for Black writers to face down racist institutions and take the lead in cultural conversations.Last month, popular music lost one of its greatest philosophers and storytellers: The critic, scholar, teacher, musician and New York City grass-roots cultural icon Greg Tate, a towering intellect and a modern-day griot, died at 64. His singular critical prose — in The Village Voice and Vibe, among other outlets, and collected in two anthologies — seamlessly fused dense, dazzling vernacular wisdom and street corner wit with equally intricate ivory tower analytic discourse.When I set out to organize the “dream team” lineup for a round-table session titled “Black Critics Matter” for the 2021 Pop Conference — an annual gathering of journalists, academics, musicians and other creatives — Tate was the first person I contacted. In his 40-year career as a working critic, he revolutionized the form and content of music journalism by centering Blackness as both the analytic framework to engage and experience popular music as well as the language to tell the story of the music itself in living color.Our April session included three other pioneering writers: the critic, poet, novelist, playwright, librettist and scholar Thulani Davis; the New York Times critic-at-large Wesley Morris; and the veteran music journalist Danyel Smith, the host of the “Black Girl Songbook” podcast and author of the forthcoming “Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop.” Below are edited excerpts from the hour-plus panel. (The full conversation is available here.)The conversation was wide-roving: at turns, intimate and candid, funny and incisive, moving and brutally honest, and consistently reflective and mindful of the under-acknowledged import of Black critical voices and the role that they play in challenging the racism at the foundations of cultural institutions, and the taste-making power those institutions continue to wield.We started by affirming simple truths: that Black critics have been setting the record straight and engaging Black citizenry “in the making of its own story,” as Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang wrote in 2019, across the centuries, from Frederick Douglass’s sharp observations about blackface minstrelsy to the barrier-breaking journalism of theater and music columnists like Pauline Hopkins, Sylvester Russell and Lester Walton in the late 19th and early 20th century. The long Harlem Renaissance gave us figures like Nora Holt, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. And Amiri Baraka and Phyl Garland wed Black nationalist desire with fierce, experimental music criticism in the Black Arts era.Their work helped lead an intellectual revolution in writing and thinking about the importance of Black sound, but also more broadly showcased the meaning of being an informed, opinionated and passionate listener dedicated to inviting readers into felt and meaningful conversations about the culture that matters to them. Greg Tate carried that tradition forward with a combination of potent love for Black peoples and a swagger fueled by that same deep and unbridled affection. In April, when the annual PopCon holds its 20th anniversary gathering in Brooklyn, it’ll be a second-line lovefest for one of its greatest voices.DAPHNE A. BROOKS Many of us have been thinking for some time about the absolutely crucial role that critics of color, that women critics, that L.G.B.T.Q. critics can and have played in shifting and opening up and challenging the kinds of conversations, the value systems, taste-making, and gatekeeping rituals and processes that have long dominated mainstream popular music criticism. If 2020 reminded us of anything, it’s that the struggle for African American autonomy in the American body politic is a multifaceted one tied to necessary and interlocking social, political as well as cultural revolutions in valuing Black life. Culture critics, we know, play a pivotal role in identifying and narrating the dimensions of that value. But in the history of popular music culture across the 20th and 21st centuries, how often have we extensively imagined Black folks as critics, as knowledge producers in relation to their own expressive cultures?GREG TATE I discovered that music critics existed because I was doing research for a comic book I wanted to write back in the early ’70s. I went to the library and got all the books about music that I could find, one of which was Amiri Baraka’s “Black Music.” And after that, I exchanged comic book superheroes for great Black music superheroes, because the way Baraka wrote about Sun Ra, Archie Shepp and Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor elevated them to the level of superheroes to me.The way he was able to bring his poetics into writing about music and left these indelible lines — these things, they’ve formed my own critical perspective, my own critical understanding of the way in which the opportunity to talk about the music is of course the opportunity to bring our whole lives to who we are. And it’s also the reason that most of us who were writing in the ’80s and ’90s really became, or were, multidisciplinary artists. We never thought that criticism was the be all and end all of what we had to offer.Between I’d say 1977 and 2000, there was a community of Black writers in New York: The Voice first, but then The Source and then Vibe. So all of us come into the game thinking of Black criticism is something we do as a gang. And because you had the near instant gratification of response from the community, you knew what you were writing was having impact. With The Voice, if it came out on Wednesday, you knew by Saturday what people were thinking of it.WESLEY MORRIS At some point I figured out that there were definitely some gaps in terms of who was speaking and who was writing about what. I would spend hours on end watching BET, VH1 and MTV, and you start to see that there are people being put in boxes by these programmers. I mean Joan Armatrading? She was never on MTV. I could see that there were things that needed to be addressed, or redressed, in terms of who was being acknowledged, whose existences were being acknowledged. There are Black women who’ve made music that changed my life that have never received a review in any magazines. The thoroughest description I got was Vibe, when it showed up. Because I had been waiting for that. I had been waiting for people to acknowledge that there was some merit to this music.I’ve noticed in the last 10 years, say, but it’s probably even older than that, that there is a real reluctance to seriously engage with the work and the craft of the work and what pop music is doing, what it sounds like. I don’t know if that’s a fear of getting it wrong. I don’t know if that’s a fear of what Twitter might do to you if you do get it wrong. This is related to a question of ethics, which is what is falling in that lacuna between greatness and crap that only criticism can both explicate and reify in some way. To me, it feels like a crisis that nobody’s really acknowledging, but I think that’s because there still aren’t enough Black people to pick that work up and do something.DANYEL SMITH Listen, it’s the criticism that’s missing in action without question. I am consistently, constantly in a mild panic about the music that has been created over the last 15 to 20 years that has not been listened to like it’s real music. I am concerned about artists like Cardi B and Drake, who are literally the biggest stars in the entire world, and their music is not talked about with a lot of seriousness. Comparing it to what happened in the past, comparing it to what could happen in the future, the context of when it came out to when it didn’t. Again, as an editor, I say, what about the knowing, deeply reported stories and the profiles that are not being written? The columns?It has to do, I think with there being a generation of Black writers who have not really ever worked with Black editors. And I think, flawed as we were, at Vibe, XXL, The Source, Essence — there were hip-hop magazines all over — there has not been enough of “I’m a Black editor that knows a lot; and I’m a Black writer that wants to know more.” I don’t know where they’re happening. Not nearly enough, anyway.TATE Well, I’ll first say, and this is in response to Wesley: Internet killed the Black music journalist star or the Black music star publication. But that was a different world we existed in just in terms of the power that labels had, right? If you wanted your music, you had to get it in a CD form from a major label. So the work we did as independent writers, and as “Blacketty-Black” as we were in the writing, it was very much tied to the commercial life of those publications: the ads The Voice got, Vibe got, Source got from labels. So on just a base level, what we were doing was glorified consumer reporting. That’s why those voices mattered, but what also happened around 2000 and in the arts was that the published pool of writers on hip-hop shifted more from Black to white. Why? Most of our colleagues by that time had just moved out of doing music journalism at all. People grew up, they had marriages, they had kids, kids needed to be fed and properly clothed and sent to the right school. And hip-hop at that point blew up in the suburbs in a major way. But the thing was that notion of Black writing being essential to one’s understanding of the culture, where the culture was no longer the culture as we’d known it in ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.BROOKS: But let’s be real, right. We know historically that jazz and blues criticism has been the domain of white men.TATE Yeah and certainly, that’s the radical transformation that hip-hop criticism offers. It was the first time in the history of the music that Black writers were writing about it authoritatively as it was being created.THULANI DAVIS But I want to say there, you all are talking out of a wealth of information …. This is the moment to teach young people that they’re in a continuum, because I don’t know that they’re aware of that. The one thing about the ’60s and the ’70s was everybody got some education about what happened before them and what the continuum was like. This is a particularly good time to ask, “What is it that the critic needs to know?” Because any critic of anything needs to know something more than the last 25 years of their lives. They need to know everything you all have been talking about.I think also there’s this idea that everybody has a platform, everybody can be a platform …. I do think people have to think about working together, because one of the things about the culture right now, it’s one star at a time. The collective conversation would be useful. We need to keep asking how do we push awareness, taste, interesting writing styles? How do we push forward? I think it can’t be one at a time. I don’t think that’ll work in the way that information is disseminated now.TATE I just want to paraphrase Baldwin: “Ours is a story that must be told again and again and again, because the erasure goes on as the culture is emerging.” You can’t reboot the institutional access that we had in that particular moment because of how incendiary the culture was in that period. People were coming up with new paradigms for what hip-hop or rap was every week, it changed. There was just an understanding that there needed to be writers who were on the ground, who got it, who lived it, embodied it at a certain level.We haven’t even tracked the kind of self-making, cultural transformation of the landscape that got affected by all this writing, by these gangs of folks being at these institutions at that particular time. The conversation about hip-hop that is still sustained is the one that we created in the ’80s and ’90s. And it extended, of course, to what was happening in Black academia, what was happening in Black film.BROOKS So it means that at the point in which we’re writing about popular music, for instance, we’re asking questions that start with, “What are the conditions that created this music in the first place?” We need to start at that level. We need to start at 1619 before we can actually get to the place of critics being able to dissect and write really beautifully about the richness, the depth, the urgency and complexity of what our music is, why we made it, what it means to us. It’s a 400-year story. More