It was meant to be a happy song—you could tell by its confident insistence on Christ’s kingship, by the shuffling major key in which it was played, and by the smiles and falsetto ad-libs it elicited from the crowd. But, either there in the sanctuary or later, lying in bed, I sometimes fixated on the bit about the gates of Hell. My father had died recently, and I’d begun wondering where he might be. I’d been assured that he was in Heaven, but I could tell, even then, that he hadn’t been a saint. Sometimes I pictured him enveloped in light, dissolving into the never-ending worship around the throne of God. Other times, helped along by the accounts of my Jesuit schoolteachers, I imagined him waiting, otiose and slightly bored—restless, as he had often seemed to be in life—in the long, cosmic queue of Purgatory. Also possible, I had to concede, was the Bad Place, which, until then, I’d thought of mostly as the un-air-conditioned underside to Heaven.
Here, though, was a different idea. Hell, according to the logic of the song, wasn’t only a place beneath my feet for the lesser of the dead but a force ruling a large portion of the world around me, gathering troops and waging battle against the good. More immediately distressing than the prospect of going there was the idea that it could be headed in my direction, determined to overtake me even before my death. “Satan has desired to have you,” my new pastor sometimes preached, quoting Jesus’ words to the apostle Peter, “that he may sift you as wheat.” Had Hell already occupied me, before I’d even known about the war?
So, to return to the “Death of the Author,” not only did authors have it coming; they largely enacted their own death by making the renunciation of meaning — or even speech — a privileged literary maneuver. They set themselves above the vulgar garrulity of traditional forms to pursue subtle but evanescent sensations in an almost priestly atmosphere. Not all artists, of course, took this path. At the same time that Gustave Flaubert was downgrading the subject matter of literature to the status of a mere excuse for style, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was developing the realistic novel to its fullest polemical potential. But the avant-garde of the future would see itself in Flaubert and the Symbolists more than in the realistic works of Dostoyevsky, Dickens, or Zola, and it was the former conception of literature that would hold weight for literary critics in the 20th century. This was especially true of poetry critics, the most influential being T. S. Eliot.
The essence of my single-sentence tinkering is in the phrases, “I think it’s important that a writer change,” and “So when I finish a book, I don’t write anything for six months.”
One thing I love about these words is how they have helped me excuse the long periods of time I’ve taken between books; Carver liked six months, but I’m averaging more like six years, if we’re going by publication dates. I wasn’t not writing during those gap years, I tell myself; I was giving myself time to become a different kind of writer.
Another thing I love about these words is the idea—so casually made it’s easy to miss—that it’s important that a writer change.
If a sense of the spiritual anchors Ho’s personal life, it is her political convictions that have come to define her public persona. Six years ago, she became the first major female star in Hong Kong to come out as gay, a significant move in a society that remains culturally conservative. Then, in 2014, during what became known as the Umbrella Revolution—protesters held up umbrellas as a protection against teargas—she joined thousands of people demonstrating against Beijing’s encroachments on the autonomy of Hong Kong. (In 1842, China ceded Hong Kong Island to the British, who gave it back with additional territory in 1997, in an agreement that secures certain privileges of self-governance for the territory.)
At the protests, Ho and a number of other Cantopop singers performed a song, “Raise the Umbrella,” that became the anthem of the movement. In the third month of demonstrations, she was arrested. The footage of her being led away by police furnished one of the enduring images of the protests. On the Chinese mainland, where Ho had been a burgeoning star, and where most of her income came from, she became persona non grata. State media outlets called her “a poison of Hong Kong,” and one editorial warned that the mainland sales Ho depended on were far from guaranteed: “Don’t think you can eat our food and smash our pots at the same time.” Since then, her music has been rigorously purged from streaming platforms in China, and she is banned from having a social-media presence there. As Beijing chips away at Hong Kong’s freedoms, Ho has become an emblematic figure of the territory—embattled, emboldened, and unbeholden.
The Wall of Birds is decidedly not a field guide — it has heavy board covers, measures nine inches by 10 and a half inches, and weighs in at just over three pounds — too large and heavy for a birder’s knapsack. It wouldn’t be very useful in the field, since it doesn’t offer the information a birder often wants: nothing, for example, about identifying marks, mating practices, habitat preferences, call/song, diet, et cetera. It’s not really a coffee-table book either, though it has something of the look of that genre, with Kim’s fabulously detailed head-portrait of a great hornbill (Buceros bicornis) occupying about one third of the front cover, and with hundreds of her energetic, brightly colored paintings inside.
As soon the reader opens it, however, she finds a serious essay in scientific ornithology from the unique point of view of a scientific illustrator-artist. It’s also a fascinating artist-diary explaining some of the hundreds of decisions Kim had to make as she painted 243 full-color, life-sized images of birds onto a 40-by-100-foot interior wall at the Visitor Center of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. That wall became her canvas when she agreed — enthusiastically — to take on the project.
Kennedy’s slim, suggestive fable is about the need for kindness to strangers; it’s about greed and politics; it’s about migration. It’s about the lessons we learn from the books we read as kids. What The Little Snake is about more than anything, though, is the acceptance of death as an ineluctable part of life. It’s not a new message, but Kennedy conveys it here in a manner that is subtle and hugely moving.
The newspaper, The Portland Press Herald, promptly responded with a challenge: If Mr. King could get his followers to buy 100 digital subscriptions, it would bring back the local reviews.
The exchange took off on social media as The Press Herald led a campaign to get readers to subscribe. “We’d be willing to bet a retweet by @StephenKing would get us over the threshold,” the newspaper tweeted on Saturday morning.
“Sales pitch? Blackmail?” Mr. King wrote back. “Either way, 71 people have subscribed so far. Are there 29 more Twitterheads out there who want to ante up? Just asking.”