The New Yorker, 2005-10-31

[fiefoe]

"Homer's Wars" / Adam Gopnik

• Henry James's famous complaint about the thinness of American experience applies here; Homer's people are thin. When a Manet woman reads a book, she is situated within a city and a whole set of social relations defined by the hat she wears, the train behind her, all conjuring a social world of ambivalent attitudes as perfectly as a page of Proust. When a Homer girl reads a book, she is a bored American girl reading a book. But it is the thinness of transparency; we see  what's going on in his people's lives in an instant.
• The crucial elements of Homer's mature style - the appetite for the isolated figure, the search for truth of pose even at the price of obvious grace, the love of aberrant perspectives, the marriage of sharp observation and decorative patterning - are all part of an aesthetic that derived, .. from Manet's idea of Japanese art.
  
• Irritability is the besetting sin of aging artists, as garrulousness is that of aging writers;
• Narrative in writing can take any amount of digression,... but a single stray incident in painting spoils the whole, which arrives all at once, in a moment of vision.
• His haunts, an his attitudes, uncannily anticipate Hemingway's.
  

"The Fox Hunt", "Winter - A Skating Sceen", ("The Mink Pond", "A Wall, Nassau", "Fisherwoman"), Thomas Eakins, profil perfu

"The Spanish Prisoner" / George Packer

__ Hemingway's latest distraction from the thought of suicide, Martha Gellhorn
__ "That's what made him show up with no food. Dos (Passos) had no balls; Dos had no understanding of war."

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