Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 215

Horace and Pete Is Louis C.K.'s Take on American Melodrama

Louis C.K.’s new show Horace and Pete, available to view only on his website, is best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible. Set in a 100-year-old bar in Brooklyn, its premise might initially seem familiar, and indeed this is a show where bartenders and customers trade jabs about their personal lives and the day’s goings-on like they’ve known each other for years. But it’s no sitcom. Horace and Pete is, in fact, an intense family melodrama that unfurls with all the blunt force of an Arthur Miller play. Though it perhaps has more in common with a different medium—theater—the series is one of the most innovative, invigorating pieces of television in years.

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Since the show’s debut on the comedian’s website two months ago, six episodes have dropped, each costing between $2 and $5 to watch. It has an all-star cast, relatively simple production values, and is associated with no broadcast network. The first episode arrived with no warning on January 30, setting up the lore of the show and introducing its central characters. Filmed in the bar, a ragged location that seems stuck in time even as the borough around it evolves and gentrifies, Horace and Pete is a darkly funny tale of one extended family’s stasis, and the format harkens back to the earlier days when TV shows basically amounted to filmed plays. Despite being shot in a multi-camera sitcom style, this is less Cheers and more General Electric Theater, the 1950s anthology series that aired an original drama on CBS every week to the country’s new generation of TV-watchers.

Horace (C.K.) is a divorced guy in his early 50s who inherited the bar from his father. He runs it with his brother, Pete (Steve Buscemi), a friendly but melancholy helper who lives in a small room downstairs, and both are continually berated by both their irascible uncle Pete (Alan Alda) and their customers from behind the counter. Horace’s sister, Sylvia (Edie Falco), wants to cash in on Brooklyn’s coolness and sell the bar, while Horace is struggling to maintain a relationship with his daughter Alice (Aidy Bryant). Meanwhile, barflies played by Steven Wright, Kurt Metzger, Jessica Lange, and others chip in topical commentary and stir up various kinds of trouble.

Still think it sounds like a sitcom? Well, nobody’s laughing. Plus, there’s tons of bad language, and the episodes are four times as long. Imagine an Eugene O’Neill play, but with a little more hope, a little more emphasis on humor, and plenty of sly winks to the news of the day. (The Pulitzer-winning playwright Annie Baker is a consultant.) The show, shot on two soundstages, is produced so quickly that it can be making fun of Chris Christie’s endorsement of Donald Trump the week it happened, and yet at other times it bears the significance of an important relic of American drama that’s just been unearthed.

I don’t want to spoil too much of what happens in the show, but the plot is surprisingly dense, with each episode digging through the history of Horace’s family. Uncle Pete, a horrifying racist and sexist who says at least six inexcusable things an episode, is a living example of the strange legacy his nephews have been burdened with. He’s a symbol of a bygone age, something to be ignored and shoved into a dark corner, even if Horace can’t bring himself to completely exile him. Sylvia is the loudest voice in favor of abandoning ship, but as the series continues, viewers learn more and more about Horace’s personal history, and just why he won’t take the easy money (the bar is worth millions) and run.

Horace and Pete is a darkly funny tale of one extended family’s stasis.

C.K. has long been a student of TV history. His near-forgotten HBO sitcom Lucky Louie was an attempt to revive the Honeymooners-style working-class shows of yesteryear with a modern, profane perspective, but it never quite worked. The crucial difference between that show and Horace and Pete? The latter doesn’t have a laugh track. As C.K. himself said on his site, “This show is not a ‘comedy.’ I dunno what it is. It can be funny. And also not. Both. I believe that ‘funny’ works best in its natural habitat. Right in the jungle along with ‘awful,’ ‘sad,’ ‘confusing,’ and ‘nothing.’” That said, when Horace and Pete does provoke laughs, they usually stem from some combination of shock horror.

If the show has flaws—it’s certainly slow-moving, and the intentional abrasiveness of its characters can sometimes feel cartoonish—they deserve to be forgiven just because of the singularity of vision on display. After the first two episodes, which are long and plot-heavy, the third focuses entirely on one conversation between Horace and his ex-wife Sarah (played by Laurie Metcalf). It dives into the show’s expanding mythology, but is also a striking 45-minute analysis of the horrible mistakes people are prone to making in their personal lives, and the sympathy and scorn they deserve in equal measure. It’s a crystallization of the bitter, humanistic, sometimes infuriatingly apolitical view of society which comes out in C.K.’s standup comedy—that we’re all monsters, so maybe nobody is.

But perhaps most importantly, through six episodes, the show doesn’t feel remotely beholden to the traditional demands of a studio, and it has a huge effect on the narrative. There’s no need for ad breaks, no desire to snap the story back to a status quo, and a genuine thrill to be found in having no idea what might happen next. C.K. doesn’t need to make 22 of these a year. He could make five more, or 50—the only thing constraining him is his own creativity. On the face of it, Horace and Pete could herald some glorious era of independent television. More likely, it’s going to end up a wonderful, strange anomaly.

In a way, though, it feels similar to the show’s titular bar—it’s an old-school curiosity that manages to capitalize on its co-existence with the smoother, more corporate world around it. In the show, younger Brooklynites often drop by the bar simply out of fascination with its existence—it doesn’t even serve mixed drinks, so how could it turn a profit? The experience might be unusual, but it’s worth trying just for the fact that there may never be anything like it again.

American Strikes Against al-Shabaab

The United States has launched airstrikes against a training facility in Somalia operated by the Islamist militant group al-Shabaab, killing about 150 fighters, the Pentagon said Monday.

American warplanes struck the camp on Saturday and targeted fighters that officials said posed an “imminent threat” to U.S. forces and the African Union Mission to Somalia, a peacekeeping coalition operated by the African Union, said Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook in a statement.

The strikes centered on a facility in Rasa, about 120 miles north of the capital city of Mogadishu, as fighters completed “training for a large-scale attack” on the American and African forces in the region, The New York Times reported:

They were bombed during what United States officials said they believed was a graduation ceremony, and the warplanes dropped a number of precision-guided bombs and missiles on them. “They were standing outdoors in formation,” one official said.

The Pentagon did not say exactly how officials knew of Al-Shabaab’s activities at the training camp.

Al-Shabaab emerged in Somalia in late 2006, seeking to overthrow the country’s government and establish a caliphate governed by its strict version Sharia law. The group, whose name means “the youth” in Arabic, is responsible for the 2013 attack at Kenya’s Westgate Mall that left 67 people killed and for the 2015 raid on Kenya’s Garissa University College that left 150 dead.

Al-Shabaab is believed to have between 7,000 and 9,000 fighters, and is designated a terrorist organization by the governments of the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, and others. In 2012, the group pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, the Sunni militant group operating in Iraq and Syria.

Downton Abbey’s Quiet Revolution

To love something fully and unreservedly is to acknowledge its faults and embrace it anyway. To love Downton Abbey, then, is to recognize that it was frequently one of the silliest shows broadcast on television: a lavish post-Edwardian schlockfest unabashedly reliant on some of the most cringeworthy soap-opera tropes for plot momentum. Between the badly burned impostor pretending to be a long-lost relative and heir to the estate, the myriad deaths in grisly car wrecks, and the countless fatal illnesses that turned out to be nothing a multivitamin couldn’t cure, Downton (broadcast on the for-profit ITV network in the U.K.) didn’t resemble its high-minded BBC costume-drama counterparts so much as a time-traveling season of Eastenders. If elevator shafts had been more common in 1920s Yorkshire, you can guarantee someone would have been shoved down one, just as reliably as you could bet Mr. Carson would have furrowed his brow at the resulting inconvenience to his lordship.

But Downton, whose last episode aired in the U.S. on PBS Sunday night, wasn’t just lovely escapism—a confection of nonsense wrapped up in organza and Harris tweed, and made distinctly more credible by the manifold talents of its cast. It was also a love letter to a time of rampant inequality and dubious feudalism. The humans of Downton are positioned in a complex hierarchy not just by virtue of their fortune, but also by their birth, something Mr. Molesley hinted at in one of his history lessons when he asked his students to ponder the divine right of kings. The universe of the show exists on a plane that’s totally at odds with the American Dream: Status isn’t so much about money or power as it is class. For all the education Daisy acquires, or all the customers Mrs. Patmore hosts in her now-slightly-more-salubrious B&B, neither will really be able to escape the system that literally had them both in positions of servitude.

So the question is, why was Downton so popular? How could a show romanticizing the considerable gaps between rich and poor have so many fans in a country founded upon the notion that all men are created equal? What could explain the persistent appeal of a show so absurd in its core that it had (by my shaky count) at least nine separate subplots revolving around blackmail? The superficial answer is that Downton was often simple, satisfying entertainment, with human-interest issues, compelling characters, and serial storytelling that stretched out plot lines long past the point of elasticity. The more complex one is that Downton, initially, offered an attempt to reconcile the haves and the have-nots in an era of ever-increasing inequality. It seemed to want to believe in a world where everyone could buy into a symbiotic system of paternalistic generosity—one where the lord of the manor could prove to be a kind and thoughtful patron of the men and women who in turn catered to his every need.

What made the show so interesting in its sixth and final season, though, is that the cracks in this idealized détente started to show. Its biggest defender was the butler, Mr. Carson—a benevolent dictator who ran the downstairs section of the house with all the steeliness his beetling eyebrows could convey. More loyal than the family labradors, and more ardent a believer in the status quo than even Lord Grantham himself, Carson suddenly evolved into a hectoring, unkind grump who abused his new wife’s housekeeping skills as furiously as he fawned over the sacrosanct rights of his lordship to trim budgets by laying off a few servants rather than spending moderately less on claret.

Carson’s intractable belief in the upstairs/downstairs divide was revealed to be all the more ridiculous by the moments in which the family’s unchecked privilege came to the fore. Cora, long the gentle American benefactor of the family’s servants, cruelly scolded Mrs. Hughes when she found her trying on one of her coats for her upcoming wedding. Lord Grantham stupidly offered Carson the use of the servant’s hall for the same event. When the interminable debate over the village hospital’s prospective merger first came to a fore, Mrs. Hughes commented that it was all very well the family weighing in, but they ran off to London at the first sign of a cold. More than ever, the show seemed to be picking a side in the age-old conflict between master and servant.

For five seasons, Downton’s characters had lamented the onset of “change”; in the sixth, it seemed like it couldn’t come fast enough.

At the same time, the lifestyle of the landed gentry was looking more and more anachronistic. When Thomas Barrow arrived for his new job as a butler-footman hybrid to an elderly couple and was surprised to learn that the household’s staff consisted of only three people, his elderly boss replied, “This isn’t 1850, you know.” But at dinner later, as the gentleman sat in stony silence across from his wife, who was wearing her diamonds to dinner like a 1920s Miss Havisham, the scene indeed looked like a morbid historical museum exhibit. For five seasons, Downton’s characters had lamented the vague onset of “change”; in the sixth, it seemed like it couldn’t come fast enough.

The show’s creator, Julian Fellowes, bears all the hallmarks of aristocratic advantage: He was born in Cairo to a British diplomat, received a private-school education at Ampleforth, and was given a lifetime peerage by the Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010. But Fellowes also spent a decade in Los Angeles pursuing an acting career, during which time he failed to win a starring role on Fantasy Island but presumably learned his way around the very different hierarchy of the entertainment industry. His early failures sparked an innate belief that hard work, not luck, drives success. “It’s part of the key to his current success, his work ethic,” the producer Bob Balaban told The New York Times in 2011. “He doesn’t procrastinate. He doesn’t hide. He works like a demon.”

Perhaps it’s overly charitable to interpret that Downton has secretly been rooting for the working classes all this time. After all, few shows have so romanticized the relationships between the upper and working classes to such an unlikely degree (for a more honest view of service in the early-20th century, Margaret Powell’s Below Stairs is a very good read). But the finale, in which Anna gave birth in Lady Mary’s bedroom, Spratt and Lady Edith discussed a magazine column as equals, and Tom and Henry set up shop as “a couple of used-car salesmen” as Lady Mary put it, seemed to hint at a more equitable future for all the show’s various heroes and villains. This might not explain the show’s extraordinary popularity, but it makes you wonder whether, all this time, Downton secretly had a more complex worldview than viewers appreciated.

Peyton Manning’s Semi-Storybook Ending

Updated at 3:02 p.m. on March 7, 2015

Four years ago this week, Peyton Manning was released by the Indianapolis Colts. It was an emotional, tear-filled occasion. The Colts were the team that Manning had refashioned from perennial laughingstock to annual Super Bowl contender. Over the course of 13 seasons at quarterback, Manning never missed a game and the Colts won eight division titles, two AFC championships, and a Super Bowl.

After neck surgery forced Manning to miss the entire 2011-2012 season, the Colts decided to let him go. He was then a 36-year-old free agent and the only four-time MVP in NFL history. And despite some skepticism about his age and ability, Manning was courted by a number of teams including the Denver Broncos, who had a pitchman that no other team did.

Days after Manning’s release from Indianapolis, John Elway, the general manager of the Broncos, sat across from Manning and promised that “I would do everything in my power” to ensure that Manning  finished his career “the way I finished mine.” Fifteen years earlier, Elway, then quarterback for the Broncos, had finished his similarly storied 16-year career with two straight Super Bowl victories. Weeks after the second one, he retired.

The pitch worked. Eschewing potentially more favorable arrangements with other teams, Manning signed with Denver. And, just weeks after winning his second Super Bowl, Manning announced his retirement on Monday afternoon.

“I revere football. I love the game,” he said in a press conference in Denver. “You don't have to wonder if I'll miss the game. Absolutely. Absolutely, I will.”

As news of his retirement spread, tributes came in from teammates and rivals alike. Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, who had been Manning’s nemesis and foil throughout their careers, was among the first to weigh in:

Every game he has played, I have watched. I have file folders of his plays, of how he plays. It’d take years for me to watch it all again. But what he’s done in Denver has been incredible. Think of what he did—changing teams, changing organizations, at his age, and then in four years going to two Super Bowls with that team.

In four years in Denver, Manning also led the Broncos to four division titles and, in 2013, Manning had the best season of his career, breaking two NFL single-season records for touchdowns (55) and yards thrown (5,477).

Despite all of this, Manning’s last few years weren’t entirely without blemish. His otherworldly campaign in 2013 ended with a savage 43-8 loss to the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl. The next year, Manning and the Broncos lost at home in the playoffs to the Indianapolis Colts, who were led by Andrew Luck, the quarterback who replaced Manning.

Manning’s final season had a pathos-filled, Elvis-in-Vegas quality to it. Hampered by injury, he threw eight more interceptions than touchdowns and was benched halfway through the year. The Broncos continued to win on the strength of their defense and their run game. Manning eventually resumed his starting role in the playoffs, ably managing the offense, but hardly standing out.

A Super Bowl win conceals most cracks and flaws, but Manning’s triumphant coda also dovetailed with the reemergence of an old sexual-assault claim from his college years and the fallout from a report alleging that Manning used human-growth hormones in 2011. On Monday, an NFL source told NBC Sports that investigations into the latter controversy will continue despite Manning’s retirement, but with limited potential effect.

Nevertheless, following Manning’s press conference on Monday, he’ll almost certainly end up in the front office of an NFL team or in the broadcast booth that he was seemingly made for. And in short time, the NFL Hall of Fame.

House of Cards Season 4, Episode 13: The Live-Binge Review

As in previous years, I’m binge-reviewing the latest season of Netflix’s House of Cards, the TV show that helped popularize the idea of “binge watching” when it premiered in 2013. Don’t read farther than you’ve watched.

Episode 13 (Chapter 52)

For a while there, it looked like this House of Cards season might be headed toward a demented kind of happy ending. When Claire was negotiating with Yusuf Al Ahmadi to replace the caliphate with a secular government at the same time that Frank gave Tom Hammerschmidt his fiercest spin, it became possible to imagine that the show might choose to absolve the Underwoods. If it did, it would not only send a message about the invulnerability of true megalomaniacs, but also one about the idea that the world can only ever be changed—perhaps only ever be saved—through the self-interest of megalomaniacs.

More House of Cards




Ep.10: Chapter 49
Ep.11: Chapter 50
Ep.12: Chapter 51

Might it still end there, eventually? House of Cards, perhaps to its credit, doesn’t spend much time ever telling us how the Underwoods justify themselves to themselves. They want power because they want power and that’s it. But in his showdown with Hammerschmidt, Frank came as close as he’s ever come to revealing the defense he’d have given to St. Peter if that liver transplant hadn’t come through. “Name me a president you wouldn’t describe in exactly the same way,” he said. “We’re all ruthless. We all destroy. But corruption, that’s a matter of perspective.” In other words, this is the job. But Hammerschmidt had already given the alternate reading of that idea when Frank implored him to hold off his story because of the hostage crisis: “That’s the same reasoning dictators use.”

It’s hard to imagine the show being watchable for much longer now that this rubicon of despicability has been crossed.

It’s tempting to say that Hammerschmidt is the unambiguous winner in that argument once you’ve seen the Underwoods decide to invade the Middle East to distract the public from their misdeeds. But the specter of war initiated for domestic political reasons is certainly not foreign to America. The obvious parallel suggested by the show is George W. Bush using the country’s post-9/11 anxiety to attack Iraq. But the book that inspired Wag the Dog—an obvious precedent of this plotline—was a satire of Bush Sr. and the first Gulf War. And with his national address referencing the nature of fear, Underwood was also channeling FDR; his declaration of war after Pearl Harbor has long been targeted by conspiracy theorists whose allegations, if nothing else, draw from the fact that even just wars must be waged with political calculation in a democracy.

As for season four as a whole, I’d grade it highly. The writing, acting, and direction on this show is always strong, but unlike with the past few seasons, there were very few stretches of these new episodes that could be classified as “boring.” That fact owes in large part to the writers refraining from overcrowding the story with subplots, instead maintaining momentum by keeping a central conflict in view: first, Claire’s ambitions; then the aftermath from Frank being shot; then the race against the Conways. To be sure, Doug’s infighting with Leann and Seth occasionally became tiresome, and I don’t think anyone was thrilled whenever the Underwoods’ new data scientist showed up blasting loud music. On the other side of the ledger: The journalistic storyline unfolded at a satisfyingly methodical pace, and in a rare sop to idealism, Cards gave two of the most likable characters, Remy and Jackie, a bit of redemption—not to mention a classic drive-into-the-sunset moment in the finale.

But the fact that the season culminated in live video of the execution of an American suggests that Cards is about to head to its darkest place yet, which is a considerable distinction. The Underwoods have murdered a politician and a journalist, and some innocents have also been collateral damage to their activities. Now, though, they’ve set out to maintain their power at the cost of mass casualties. Netflix hasn’t said how many seasons are to come, but it’s hard to imagine the show being watchable for all that much longer now that this rubicon of despicability has been crossed. Season five may finally depict the Underwoods’ downfall, but now there’s the grim possibility it could depict America’s, too.

The Wildest Rumpus: Maurice Sendak and the Art of Death

Maurice Sendak had always been obsessed with death. He drew through his obsession, used it. He drew lions that would swallow you; he drew wild things that gnashed their terrible teeth; he drew faceless hooded goblins stealing babies out of a window; he drew fat bakers who’d bake you up in a pie; he drew a 9-year-old pig that promised he would never turn 10. He drew funny, charming, cheerful, haunting near-deaths. He drew narrow escapes, popping up, resurrection.

He knew what it was like to be so depressed that dying did not seem crazy or outlandish or remote. He had a kind of intimacy with death, with the idea of it, anyway.

Even as a tiny child in Brooklyn, Maurice was unusually alert to the prospect of dying. He was floored by every childhood sickness—measles, scarlet fever, double pneumonia. “My parents were not discreet,” he said. “They always thought I was going to die.” He laid out the toy soldiers on the blankets of his sickbed. He watched other children play through the window.

One day his grandmother, who had emigrated from the shtetls outside Warsaw, dressed him in a white suit, white shirt, white tights, white shoes, and took him out to the stoop to sit with her. The idea was that the angel of death would pass over them and think that he was already an angel and there was no need to snatch him from his family.

During one illness Maurice had as a toddler, his mother found him clawing a photo of his grandfather that hung above the bed; he was speaking Yiddish, even though he only knew English. She thought a dybbuk was trying to claim him from beyond the grave, so she tore up the photograph. She said she burned it, but years later Maurice found the torn-up pieces in a Ziploc bag among her possessions. He had a restorer put it back together and he kept it in his house, this grandfather calling him to the grave.

The general message from his family seemed to be that he should be grateful to be alive, that his continued existence involved some aspect of luck that should not, if he was smart, be pushed. When he was very small, his parents told him that when his mother was pregnant they went to the pharmacy and bought all kinds of toxic substances to induce a miscarriage, and his father tried pushing her off a ladder. They hadn’t wanted a third child. Why would they tell a tiny child this? As a famous artist, later in life, he brushed the question off in an interview, as though it wasn’t in fact a big deal—they were harried immigrants, they didn’t need another mouth to feed, though surely something deeper was etched into his sense of himself. He was unwanted, unwelcome, somehow meant to die, meant to be carried off. He said once, “I felt certain my mother did not like me.”

There is a formal photograph of his dumpling-shaped mother, her wavy hair chin length, with her three wary children, the wariest of all being baby Maurice, who is dressed in a white bonnet and appears from his scowl to already be seeing some pretty wild things. She is looking at the camera as if it might at any moment leap out and attack her. Theirs was not a happy or relaxing home. Sadie Sendak was often furious. She had trouble with warmth. The siblings turned to one another, sometimes sleeping together like kittens, three in a bed. Maurice, who struggled in public interviews to be generous to his mother, said that she should never have had children, and distant, absent, prickly, punishing mothers would be a big obsession of his books.

Sendak’s belief was that kids are already scared, that what they crave is seeing their anxieties thrillingly laid out.

The literary critic Stephen Greenblatt once wrote about Sendak’s books: “Love often takes the form of menace, and safe havens are reached, if they are reached at all, only after terrifying adventures.”

All his life Maurice bristled at the idea of childhood innocence and at those who thought his books were offending or challenging it. In a comic Art Spiegelman did in The New Yorker of a conversation they had in the woods, Maurice says: “People say, ‘Oh, Mr. Sendak. I wish I were in touch with my childhood self, like you!’ As if it were all quaint and succulent, like Peter Pan. Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth! ... In reality, childhood is deep and rich ... I remember my own childhood vividly … I knew terrible things ... but I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew ... it would scare them.”

Maurice liked to tell the story of the daughter of a friend who was at school near the World Trade Center when the towers fell. She told her father that she saw butterflies on the building as the towers collapsed. Later she admitted that they weren’t butterflies, they were people jumping, but she didn’t want to upset her father by letting him know that she knew. Children protect their parents, which is the funny part of childhood that slips away from us, the awful knowledge it contains.

The received wisdom is that it is not good to scare kids, but Sendak’s belief was that kids are already scared, that what they crave is seeing their anxieties thrillingly laid out. Much of Sendak’s work, then, exists between play and terror, that infinitely intriguing, purely fantastical place where you are joked out of your most serious fears. But those fears are also entertained on the most serious and high level in Sendak’s books; they are not dismissed but reveled in, romped through.

* * *

After the runaway success of Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice ran into a friend from Lafayette High School. She was the girl he sat next to in art class. On his high-school yearbook page, which was captioned, “Your delightful drawings make us all gay. A famous artist you’ll be someday,” he had scrawled to her, “Lotsa luck to a swell gal. Sendak.”

Now she said to him, “How does it feel to be famous?” He said, “I still have to die.”

Maurice had a passion for ritual. He liked to eat the same breakfast every day—marmalade, English muffin, tea—from 9 to 11, then he would work, then get dressed and walk the dog, then have lunch, then work, then dinner with cake, and then, from about 10 to 2 in the morning, more work. The day was about creating a carapace for the work. In a letter to a reader with whom he warmly corresponded for decades, he once wrote that life was good when he was working or getting ready to work.

What is unsaid here is that life is not happy when he is not working. Like his mother and brother, Maurice had always wrangled with depression. The black moods would descend, and he would fight them off with work or, when he couldn’t work, with the idea of work. The work was, among other things, a mood stabilizer. It kept him going; it lured and cajoled him back to life.

Sendak often talked about his books as a “battleground” or “battles.” In the hours in his studio, under the cheap white lamp clipped to his drawing desk, he was fighting. The business of creating children’s books was not a sweet, civilized occupation; it was violent, bloody. He was defending or protecting himself.

The books and drawings and opera backdrops came to save him. Or he dreamed and labored to save himself.

“I’m totally crazy, I know that,” he once said. “I don’t say that to be a smartass, but I know that that’s the very essence of what makes my work good.” The craziness was in his work. The blackness was vital; he called it “the shadows.” The shadows were in the illustrations. Without them, there would be only charm.

Those close to him sometimes heard the extremes of depression in his voice; he had more than a passing acquaintance with the edge. He smuggled moments of numbed depression into Higglety Pigglety Pop!—“The lion said, ‘Please eat me up. There is nothing more to life’”—and into My Brother’s Book.

Maurice wrote a letter in the mid-’70s about being in a funk in San Francisco. He is working on a book that he thinks may be his finest. This makes all the difference to his mood. He talks about the book as if it has entered the world to redeem him. He knows that the idea of art rescuing you is a cliché, but in this case, it’s really true. He’s going to make it because of the book.

This seems not an overstatement: The books and drawings and opera backdrops came to save him. Or he dreamed and labored to save himself.

* * *

“Please don’t go. We’ll eat you up, we love you so!” say the wild things to Max in one of Sendak’s most immortal lines. Love here is terrifying, consuming, exhilarating; it is infinitely recognizable, even to small children, annihilating, seductive. It’s the purest expression we have of the delirious violence of strong feeling. The British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott once wrote that the mother must resist making love to or eating her child, which resonates because certain loves are so fierce and urgent, it feels as if you want to bite or eat or consume the object of that love.

Maurice said he dreamed up the idea of the wild things as an adult, at a shiva after someone had died, with his brother and sister. They were sitting around, laughing about their relatives from Europe. The relatives didn’t speak English. Their teeth were yellow. They grabbed the children’s cheeks. It was like they would gobble up Maurice and his siblings, along with everything else in the house. The wild things were Jewish relatives.

It’s the artist’s impulse: to turn something terrible into art, to take something you are terrified of and heartbroken by and make it into something else.

In fact, Sendak’s books are filled with beasts that might eat you, often lions. There is the lion in Higglety Pigglety Pop!, a stately yet cryptic menace, who closes his jaws around Jennie’s head; there is the lion in the nutshell library, who swallows Pierre and then, after being hit on the head with a folding chair and shaken up and down by a doctor, spits him out again on the floor; there is the bear in My Brother’s Book, who bites the brother and kills him. The idea of being consumed by an animal is a code for death—that is, depending on the moment in Sendak’s life, either easily reversible or not. He is playing here with a very basic primal fear—being swallowed by a beast, a child’s fear—but it is also a fear of being consumed, obliterated; it is about the loss of self on the most grave and terrifying adult level. Can you be close to another person without being consumed?

He liked to say that when his sister gave him his first book, he bit it. This fits with his sensual apprehension of the universe, his physical devouring of people, places; he took things in more sensually than most—he hugged his friends, grabbed their noses, kissed them on the lips.

There is a moment in Where the Wild Things Are when Max gets lonely with the wild things, in his tent, in the great orange dusk, and wants to go where someone loves him best of all. For Max, that someone is his mother, who has made him a warm supper with a big slice of layer cake. She is one of the great reassuring presences of a mother in literature, but for Maurice, that person was never his mother. Did people love him best of all? He voraciously hungered to know that they did.

* * *

Maurice liked to watch medical shows. He would be happy sitting at the dinner table, watching a graphic reality-TV surgery show while eating spaghetti. Someone sitting with him might wonder why he liked watching a human body ripped open, what he wanted to see.

On some level this could be seen as research, as Sendak belaboring a problem that obsessed him. He had always worked extraordinarily hard. He did more drafts, more dummy books, more tracings over light boxes, more fully realized drawings for his opera backdrops than he needed to, than other artists would, than necessity demanded; he labored toward the final version; he fought for it. His mastery of so many different styles and his vast strides in technical achievement are not a mystery: He worked insanely hard for them, and he was also working, in his own vivid way, on death.

Tony Kushner wrote about a conversation he had with Maurice:

I tell him I will visit him in Connecticut. “Great,” he says. “We can dance a kazatzkah!” “What kind of dance is that?” I ask. “A kazatzkah is the Dance of Death,” he tells me. “Sounds good. Do you know the steps?” I ask. “Do I know them,” he says with glee, making a kazatzkah sound like the most fun imaginable, “I know those steps in every notch, every noodle, every nerve cell! Of course I know them! I’ve been rehearsing them all my life!”

Sendak had collected a series of beloved objects that dealt with death: Mozart’s letter to his father telling him that his mother was dead. A Chagall funeral scene. A grief-struck letter he wrote at 16 to his future self on the day Franklin Delano Roosevelt died, full of lavish adolescent sorrow, railing against the people who just chattered and laughed as if nothing had happened. Wilhelm Grimm’s letter “Dear Mili,” to a child whose mother had died.

These objects were soaked in meaning for him. It was as if he had traveled somewhere and brought home souvenirs.

Maybe the most startling of these objects is Keats’s original death mask. Maurice did not keep the wooden box containing it in his bedroom but in the blue guest room. He liked to open it and stroke the smooth white forehead. He said it did not make him feel sad, it made him feel maternal.

Maurice drew his partner Eugene after he died, as he had drawn his family members when they were dying. The moment is one he was compelled to capture, pin down, understand, see. Where many— maybe most—people look away, he wanted to render. He was very wrapped up in the goodbye, the flight, the loss; it was almost Victorian, to be so deeply entranced with the moment of death, the instinct to preserve or document it. It’s also the artist’s impulse: to turn something terrible into art, to take something you are terrified of and heartbroken by and make it into something else. For the time it takes to draw what is in front of you, you are not helpless or a bystander or bereft: You are doing your job.

He wrote another beautiful letter to a reader in 1964. He tells the story of visiting an old family friend who was dying. He was very afraid of seeing her, afraid of how his parents would feel, and afraid of how he would feel. This was the last time he would see her. And yet when he did it was strangely lovely. It was like staring into something he had always been terrified of, and it was exquisite. He left feeling both miserable and elated.

This seems to be key: Staring into something you have always been terrified of and finding it beautiful.

This article has been adapted from Katie Roiphe's forthcoming book, The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End.

Is El Niño Finally Ending California's Drought?

SAN FRANCISCO—This was supposed to be California’s year.

After three years of an unprecedented drought, a “Godzilla” El Niño formed in the western Pacific. Previous years with strong El Niños had been unusually wet, with the warm patch sending one wet system after another rolling into the region. California had essentially missed two years’ worth of precipitation. Surveying the wet season to come last fall, meteorologists said that El Niño was how it might restore the balance.

Now, six weeks remain in the state’s annual rainy season, and results are mixed. Rain is drenching the Bay Area this weekend, but California as a whole seems on track to have only an average precipitation year.

Of course, that might be a surprise to people here, watching the “Blade Runner”-esque deluge out their window. This weekend’s rain comes thanks to the formation of an “atmospheric river,” a tendril of moisture lapping up from the tropics. This weekend’s rain started in the Philippines and crossed a third of the planet before it struck the Bay Area:

3-day loop of atmospheric moisture Weekend's moisture tap stretches back to the Philippines! @UWCIMSS #cawx #ElNino pic.twitter.com/vU0LG35EBs

— NWS CNRFC (@NWSCNRFC) March 4, 2016

For all this water, though, California will only see an average precipitation year.

“February was incredibly warm and dry,” says David Pierce, a researcher at Scripps Institute of Oceanography. “If you look at the curves of El Niño, February to April is when we see rainy years differentiate themselves. It’s already March. There’s another six weeks of wet season, then that’s all she wrote.”

Rain totals have differed throughout the state this year. While northern California has had a fine year, the Los Angeles basin still seems gripped by drought, Pierce said. This weekend’s rain will probably bring Bay Area totals back to normal.

But for the statewide drought—the one that shapes regional policy and local agricultural output—far more important than local rain totals are the status of the reservoirs. After the end of this pattern, Pierce said the manmade reservoirs could likely be at normal levels at last. Shasta Lake, an artificial reservoir near Redding, California, passed the 1,000-foot level on Saturday, the first time it had hit that mark since July 2013. The same lake looked like this by 2014:

Robert Galbraith / Reuters

And the most important reservoir is no lake, Pierce said, but the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The Sierra snowpack functions as the state’s largest body of moisture. Moisture accumulates there through the winter before it’s slowly released through the dry spring and summer. The Sierra meltwaters irrigate the Central Valley—which produces 8 percent of all U.S. agricultural product—and also recharge the state’s artificial reservoirs.

The snowpack had been doing well before February hit. At the end of January, it sat at 110 percent of normal, which Pierce said was within the normal variation. By the end of the month, it fell to 80 percent. The major storm expected this weekend—two feet of snow are expected on peaks above 4,000 feet—could put the snowpack above normal again.

So if these rains don’t manage it, will the snowpack end the drought over time? It’s a funny question, said Pierce, because experts aren’t sure what a drought as massive as California’s will look like as it ends. They’re not even sure when they should say a drought is over.

Some argue that a drought should end when the state finally makes up its two years of missing rain—meaning a technical “drought” could stretch on even when precipitation is normal and reservoirs are full. Others say that, after a couple years of normal rain and steady reservoirs, the whole drought might be declared over—even if California makes up those lost years. A third measurement—whether depleted groundwater should indicate a drought—would result in a far different timeframe. Pierce said that National Integrated Drought Information System is working to standardize state-specific definitions of drought across the country.

But regardless of where the line formally gets drawn, the drought’s effects will be felt here for years—in water-conservation policy, in lost crops and revenue, and as a harbinger of the new, climate-addled world to come.

The Walking Dead: Survivors or Assassins?

Every week for the sixth season of AMC’s post-apocalyptic drama The Walking Dead, David Sims and Lenika Cruz will discuss the latest threat—human, zombie, or otherwise—to the show’s increasingly hardened band of survivors.

David Sims: The Walking Dead is on a serious roll. We’ve had three great episodes in a row now—the first a somewhat comic romp, the second focused on world-building and politics, and the third a barnstorming action-adventure. I’m still worried about Negan lurking around the corner, ready to take the spotlight, but until he makes his entrance and takes over the show, we might as well have some fun, and these episodes have delivered plenty.

“Not Tomorrow Yet” was a dark, thrilling hour of TV, but it wasn’t the misery brigade that last season’s pit-of-zombies adventure often felt like. As the gang raided one of Negan’s outposts, they grappled with the moral quandaries of their violence in real-time, making split-second decisions that seemed horrifying in retrospect, but crackled with energy in the moment.

That’s what I want from this show—an exploration of the extreme choices made to survive in this world, but in real-time. At the beginning of “Not Tomorrow Yet,” Carol made cookies for the people of Alexandria (out of ... beets and acorns?), scored to a bouncy tune, a tone that echoed the relative lightness of the show’s plotting in recent weeks. Later, she tallied up numbers in a notepad, next to names like “Slabtown,” and it was quickly apparent she was accounting for just how many lives she’s personally taken over the course of the series (forgetting all the zombies, of course). It was a quick, quiet, sobering reminder, not just of all the violence committed over the years, but of how quickly everyone on The Walking Dead has to compartmentalize and move forward, just to survive. Cookies one day, murder the next.

Time has passed on the show, of course, but it’s worth remembering it hasn’t been too long since that horrifying invasion of Alexandria by the Wolves, a scarring event that the show never really had time to fully unpack because of the time jump between “No Way Out” and “The Next World.” Forget the zombie pit or the brief encounters with Negan’s men. That’s the big reason Rick is in charge, and that’s why the Alexandrians are so quick to move against the Saviors. There isn’t a lot of tolerance for outsiders anymore, and Alexandria’s rebuilt walls aren’t there for show. As The Walking Dead moves into this exploration of the first vestiges of civilization post-apocalypse, the tribalism on display is hardly surprising. Negan’s Saviors may not even know about Alexandria yet, but they pose a threat, and need to be preemptively conquered.  

At first, it seemed “Not Tomorrow Yet” would be the preamble episode before a big fight, taking stock of everyone’s situation in the town, one of those table-setters The Walking Dead often uses to mark time in the middle of a season. Not so much. We did check in with a lot of residents, but very briefly. Carol made a romantic connection with Tobin, dropping her guard and taking a tenuous step toward embracing a more settled life. Denise and Tara declared their love for each other in a very sweet scene that took me somewhat by surprise (their relationship clearly took a big leap forward during the time-jump) but still landed an emotional punch. And Abraham rather harshly dumped Rosita, following up on his story arc last week, telling her she’s no longer the last woman on earth.

“Not Tomorrow Yet” was a dark, thrilling hour of TV, but it wasn’t the misery brigade of last season.

All of these scenes had the vibe of a much, much darker war movie—soldiers heading off to the front, bidding goodbye to their loved ones in ways nice and not-so-nice. Abraham was probably being meaner than he needed to Rosita to put some necessary distance between them in case he doesn’t return, but it was still tough to watch. Tougher still was the mission itself, which involved Rick’s gang and Jesus sneaking up on Negan’s outpost, presenting Gregory’s head (actually a zombie) as a sort of peace offering, then ambushing everyone inside. This kind of sneak attack is pretty unusual for Rick’s gang, who usually only act when they’re fired upon.

The subsequent massacre was bravura television. Rick, Glenn, and others seemed genuinely disturbed at the idea of executing people they didn’t even know while they slept. Eventually, they got rumbled and we got lots of shooting and stabbing, but it was clear that this facility (a bunker underneath a huge satellite dish) was just level one of Negan’s whole enterprise. The raid was successful, but at what price? It’s hard to tell, but “Not Tomorrow Yet” was a great example of The Walking Dead having its cake with some furious action set pieces, and eating it too with some hideous moral repercussions. Were you as disturbed as I by the sleep-stabbing, Lenika? Where do Rick and company go from here?

Lenika Cruz: That whole sequence in Negan’s level-one bunker could have felt like a fun first-person-shooter mission; instead it came off as a claustrophobic nightmare, with the dim lighting, the rundown interior, and narrow hallways. And those sounds—the squelching, the crunching of bone—as Rick and Glenn sank their knives into the heads of the sleeping men were somehow more gory than watching a zombie gnaw on someone’s arm. Though I empathized with Heath, Rick, and Glenn’s horror at their own (utterly justified) actions, my concern melted away when Glenn surveyed those polaroid snapshots pinned to the wall. Forget a pleasant photo collage of smiling kids or bygone family days at the beach—who doesn’t love to fall asleep to a wall-full of pictures featuring mutilated corpses with their heads smashed in?

Cool world, this zombie apocalypse. These last few episodes especially have done a terrific job of re-situating where Rick and the gang currently fall on the moral spectrum. These check-ins are useful for viewers to understand the emotional and psychological toll different decisions will take, and how far everyone will go for X, Y, or Z reason. The Hilltop colony of last week, the Wolves from before, and even the Eastman episode all functioned as a kind of external rubric to judge the group against (the same goes for any time they meet a different community). Watching how Heath and Glenn recoiled (and cried!) as they tried to move on with the plan, juxtaposed with the apparent evil of the Saviors, felt like a clear recalibration of who our heroes are now—just before they head into yet another (likely deadly) crisis.

Another similar establishing scene: Rick in the church, relaying the terms of the deal Maggie made with Hilltop to the group, but saying that it ultimately wasn’t his decision to make. (A final message to anyone was still in doubt about the possibility of another Ricktatorship.) His much-welcomed acquiescence meant room for dissenting voices like Morgan—who proposed a sit-down before resorting to bloodshed—or Carol—who understandably questioned why a pregnant Maggie was allowed to go on such a dangerous mission. There’s plenty to be said for allowing a pregnant woman to make her own decisions and not be reduced to mere fetus incubator, but Maggie’s capture only seems to prove what a disastrous mistake it was for her to leave Alexandria. I don’t even want to think about what kind of torture the Saviors would eagerly put her through.

Who doesn’t love to fall asleep to a photo collage of mutilated corpses?

I thought Abraham’s breakup with Rosita couldn’t have been more cruelly orchestrated. You’d think that Rosita had been an awful girlfriend, rather than one who only last episode had given him a handmade memento necklace, and to whom Abraham had whispered sweet, pillow-talk nothings. If I had any renewed respect for Abraham, it vanished when he began behaving like an emotionally stunted teenager (to be honest, it felt a bit out of character for him, since he’s acted maturely and sensitively in the past). Rosita’s heartbreak was hard to watch, but there was one bright spot: Eugene’s hilariously ill-timed, bumbling appearance in the doorway, and Rosita’s subsequent door-slam.

One other loose end: Is it terrible that I loved Father Gabriel’s darkly comedic scene as the clerical-collar-wearing priest, calmly reciting Scripture before shooting the escaped Savior lying on the ground? It’s been interesting to see him reconcile his faith and his sense of self with the deeply contradictory actions he must perform in order to survive and to help protect his group. That said, part of me wonders if he’s going to swing too far in the opposite direction—he seemed almost numb as he pulled the trigger, while even Rick (who hours earlier punched a decapitated zombie head to disfigure its nose) hesitated before killing his first sleeping guard.

In the end, I was impressed The Walking Dead so quickly delivered another action-packed episode—it tends to withhold the showdowns, as if to make the most of the suspense, and squeeze in filler episodes instead. As you noted, David, “Not Tomorrow Yet” was the opposite of a filler episode. Yes, it had some slower moments that didn’t feel as well-scripted as they could have been—Tara and Denise’s farewell, or Morgan and Carol’s conversation (in which they didn’t even make eye contact! Literally, who in the real world has a serious discussion with one person standing behind the other person?). But these didn’t bother me too much in light of the significant plot movement forward and the other more meaningful instances of character development. I’m terrified for the week ahead, but this time for the right reasons: not because I’m dreading the writers screwing up the story, but because the story finally feels like it’s doing its job.

The Growing Violence Near Baghdad

At least 47 people were killed and dozens were injured Sunday when a suicide attack drove a truck loaded with explosives into a security checkpoint in Iraq.

The attack in Hillah, located about 60 miles south of Baghdad, occurred shortly after noon local time, when the entrance to the city was crowded with dozens of cars, according to the Associated Press.

The victims included 39 civilians and eight members of the Iraqi security forces. As many as 65 people were injured. The checkpoint, nearby buildings, and dozens of cars were destroyed.

Reuters reported the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack. The Sunni extremist group controls large parts of northern Iraq, including Mosul, the country’s second-largest city.

“It’s the largest bombing in the province to date," Falah al-Radhi, the head of the provincial security committee, told Reuters of Sunday’s attack.

The bombing was the latest in a rise in assaults claimed by ISIS in the country, particularly around Baghdad. In recent months, the terrorist group has increasingly used suicide attackers and car bombs to target public places and government buildings as Iraqi coalition forces attempt to recapture militant-held territory. Last week, 40 people were killed and 58 were wounded in a suicide bombing of a funeral in Muqdadiya, located 50 miles northeast of Baghdad. Six local commanders of a group of Shiite militias were among the dead. Also last week, a suicide bombing at a security checkpoint just outside the capital killed eight members of Iraqi security forces.

The day after those attacks, Iraq launched a major offensive to recapture areas north of Baghdad from ISIS, the AFP reported. The operation includes 7,000 counter-terrorism forces, soldiers, police, and other military personnel.

The United States and other nations have deployed troops to support and train Iraqi government forces and Iraqi Kurdish fighters in their fight against ISIS since the group’s rise in the summer of 2014. A U.S.-led coalition carries out near-daily airstrikes against ISIS targets in the country.

At the end of last year, Iraqi coalition forces regained control of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province held by ISIS fighters since 2014. This year, coalition forces have turned their attention to the north, where the group operates a supply route between Mosul and the Syrian city of Raqqa, which ISIS has claimed as its capital.

Violence in Iraq killed at least 670 people in February, according to United Nations estimates. Two-thirds of fatalities were civilians.

Nancy Reagan's Legacy

Former U.S. first lady Nancy Reagan has died, a spokeswoman for the Reagan library said Sunday. She was 94.

Reagan died Sunday morning in her home in Los Angeles, said Joanna Drake in a statement on the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library’s website. The cause was congestive heart failure. The former first lady will be buried at the library in Simi Valley, California, next to her husband, former president Ronald Reagan, who died in 2004.

Reagan was born Anne Frances Robbins on July 6, 1921, in New York City to Edith Luckett, an actress, and Kenneth Robbins, a car dealer who left the family soon after she was born. In 1929, her mother married Loyal Davis, a neurosurgeon, and the family moved to Chicago. Davis formally adopted her in 1935 and her name was legally changed to Nancy Davis.

She attended Smith College in Massachusetts, graduating in 1943. She subsequently went into acting, working in film, television, and stage productions. She met Ronald Reagan, the actor who would eventually become the 40th president of the United States, and they married in 1952.

Reagan was new to politics when her husband started campaigning for governor of California in the 1960s. But she was “a quick learner, always absorbing,” and was soon advising campaign managers on strategy, said Stuart Spencer, who managed the gubernatorial campaign, in The New York Times’s obituary for the first lady.

By the time her husband entered the White House in 1981, Reagan was an immense source of advice for the commander-in-chief, whom she affectionately called “Ronnie.” In her 1989 memoir, Reagan recalled the day her husband was shot as he left the Washington Hilton Hotel in 1981. She left the hospital and couldn’t sleep. “Nothing can happen to my Ronnie,” she wrote in her diary. “My life would be over.” Reagan was fiercely devoted to her husband, and was known for being his strongest protector.

Reagan’s main policy initiative as first lady involved traveling the country and speaking out against drug and alcohol abuse by young people. Her tagline,“Just Say No,” would become synonymous with substance-abuse prevention for years to come.  

She was known for her style and glamour, which occasionally critics pointed to as signs of an out-of-touch administration. Shortly after moving into the executive mansion, Reagan launched a major renovation of several rooms, including the first family’s living quarters and even the press briefing room, that called for refinished floors, fresh paint, and designer fashions.

In 1987, Reagan underwent a mastectomy after being diagnosed with breast cancer.

After the couple left the White House in 1989, Reagan continued raising awareness for substance abuse. Her husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1994, and she spent the next decade taking care of him and supporting research for a cure for the disease.

“There are people who told me it gets much easier,” Reagan said in 2007 about grieving the loss of her husband. “Well, maybe for them, but not for me. I miss him more now than I ever did.”

In 2004, Reagan broke from her party and began supporting stem-cell research in the search for a cure for Alzheimer’s disease.

Reagan is survived by her son Ron Reagan and daughter Patti Davis, who runs support groups for family members of people with Alzheimer’s.