The New Yorker, 2007-03-12

[fiefoe]

"Swan's Way" / Joan Acocella

• a 19th century subject: the idea that we all have souls that are bigger than the world, and that romantic passion reveals this to us, fatally.
• Camp was an escape route from modernism, a return to the charm and glamour that had been banned by that austere movement.
• "I pride myself on my company's curtain calls, I really do. I think you won't see a nicer curtain call than from my lot."
• As (Bourne) himself points out, same-sex relationships, however natural they are in life, are not yet natural in dance.
  

[Cartoon] Man to the back of angry departing wife hauling suitcases: "Who's going to finish your sentences?"

"Season on the Chalk" / John McPhee
__ The neck is locally frozen... The bottle is turned upright. The carbon dioxide in the champagne drives out the frozen plug.
__ Rembrandt's "The Night Watch," a huge canvas that spent the rest of the war rolled up as a stalagmite

"Chaos Under Heaven" / Louis Menand
MacMillan says that news of the visit added a new word to the Japanese vocabulary: shokku.

"En Garde!" / Arthur Krystal

• Byron’s great-uncle William, the fifth Baron Byron, killed a man after disagreeing about whose property furnished more game.
• Walter Raleigh: "but all that is rude ought not to be civilized with death.”
  
• Mark Twain, visiting Europe in the eighteen-seventies, reported that during a pistol duel each man’s gallery, for its own safety, was positioned directly behind the duellist.
• Good posture only makes you appear taller.

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