If a Tree Falls
Benjamin Wallace-Wells, in his recent Comment, notes that the response to the second Trump Administration’s policies has been more muted than it was in 2017 (February 3rd). Though counteractions may be less visible nationally, many communities are far from sitting on their hands. In Minneapolis, on February 1st of this year, thousands of immigrants and their neighbors took to the streets to assert their opposition to Trump’s deportation agenda and their dedication to protecting one another. That same day, the city of St. Paul reaffirmed its commitment to a 2004 ordinance that limits the extent to which municipal employees have to coöperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. Local acts of resistance like these have always been and will always be meaningful.
Isabelle Wattenberg
St. Paul, Minn.
Ain’t Over Yet
Kudos to Arthur Krystal for his entertaining review of Dorian Lynskey’s new book, “Everything Must Go” (A Critic at Large, February 3rd). I was ten years old during the Cuban missile crisis, and I didn’t enjoy pondering the end of life, especially when mine had hardly begun. Still, it must have made an impression on me; I graduated from college at twenty-three, amid predictions of a global famine and a nuclear war, and, seeing no guarantee that the world would last into my senior years, I decided to retire early, as it were. At thirty, I was surprised that the world was still extant, and I finally began thinking about a career. Now, forty years later, and back in semi-retirement, I’m astonished that the earth abides. According to a worldwide survey, half of young people think humanity is doomed. Who’s to say they’re wrong? In the meantime, maybe we should all take the advice of Alfred E. Neuman and say, “What, me worry?”
Ken Stanton
Angwin, Calif.
As Pretty Does
Alex Ross’s worthwhile article about Alma Mahler-Werfel does the crucial work of highlighting the talent of a long-overlooked composer, and of relating the misogyny that stifled her success (“Femme Vitale,” February 10th). But I disagree with Ross’s characterization of Tom Lehrer’s song “Alma” as “slut-shaming” and a “sniggering ballad.” On the contrary, I think Lehrer was in awe of Mahler-Werfel. Yes, the song recounts her famous marriages, but in the spoken introduction Lehrer says, “It’s people like that who make you realize how little you’ve accomplished.” Mahler-Werfel made the most of her circumstances, and Lehrer’s lyrics celebrate that: she “was one that had known how to live!”
Michael Sloan
Chevy Chase, Md.
Ross convincingly challenges Mahler-Werfel’s reputation as a “devouring maenad,” and it’s worth considering not only her compositional prowess but her influence on the Bauhaus. Ross is no doubt correct when he writes that she “had little sympathy for the hyper-objectivity” of the early movement, but this turn toward New Objectivity didn’t occur until the nineteen-twenties. It was on Mahler-Werfel’s recommendation that her husband Walter Gropius hired the Swiss painter Johannes Itten, in 1919, to run the Preliminary Course at the school, and Itten affected the Expressionist designs of its early period. So one could say that Mahler-Werfel was indirectly responsible for the emotive, mystical nascent years of the Bauhaus movement.
Rosemarie Haag Bletter
New York City
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