In today’s NYT Magazine (in print), a Jason Parham comment “This is not a drill”, on a 7/21 (in print) piece by Claudia Rankine, the comment turned into a thumbnail illustration by Giacomo Gambineri:
The Magrittean disavowal Ceci n’est pas une perceuse ‘This is not a drill’ (referring to une perceuse, a device for making — piercing — holes in things), but playing on the English catchphrase This is not a drill, conveying ‘This is the real thing, this is serious’.
The very thought-provoking Rankine piece lauded on today’s letters page is “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked. My college class asks what it means to be white in America — but interrogating that question as a black woman in the real world is much harder to do.”
On Rankine, from Wikipedia:
Claudia Rankine (born 1963) is a poet, essayist, playwright, and the editor of several anthologies. She is the author of five volumes of poetry, two plays, and various essays. [And the recipient of many awards, including a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship.]
… Rankine previously taught at Pomona College. As of 2018, she is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.
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