The New Yorker, 2006-11-27
Sep. 23rd, 2007 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiefoe"Road Trips" / David Sedaris
__ He sounded like me when I sensed that there were drugs around: "All I know is that if someone wants to get high, or wants to watch while I smoke their dope, I'll do it. I really will."
"Briefly Noted: Stealing the General by Russell S. Bonds"
__ On April 12, 1862, twenty Union soldiers in disguise boarded a train in Georgia to execute a scheme that was meant to bring a quick end to the Civil War. The plan, devised by a quinine-smuggling Union scout and an astronomer turned general, was to steal a locomotive and drive it to Chattanooga, capturing a key railroad connection whose loss would cut the Confederacy in half. The raid might have succeeded if not for the train’s conductor, who pursued the hijackers on foot (“this seemed to be funny to some of the crowd,” he said later, “but it wasn’t so to me”) and then by handcar and a series of three engines. The Union men were captured, and eight were hung as spies; some of the survivors were later the first-ever recipients of the Medal of Honor. The chase became a contemporary legend—it’s now best known as the basis of a Buster Keaton film—and Bonds’s account, the first major study in decades, is thoroughly worthy of an expedition that, a Union officer wrote, “had the wildness of a romance.”
"Street Life: Jerry Shore’s New York, and ours" / Adam Gopnik
__ some of the most aesthetically unpersuasive streets in New York City
__ Dignity opens the door to sadness.
__ Shore makes their presence something precise and quietly haunting. They’re our homes, waiting for us as patiently as soldiers’ wives.
<<
__ He sounded like me when I sensed that there were drugs around: "All I know is that if someone wants to get high, or wants to watch while I smoke their dope, I'll do it. I really will."
"Briefly Noted: Stealing the General by Russell S. Bonds"
__ On April 12, 1862, twenty Union soldiers in disguise boarded a train in Georgia to execute a scheme that was meant to bring a quick end to the Civil War. The plan, devised by a quinine-smuggling Union scout and an astronomer turned general, was to steal a locomotive and drive it to Chattanooga, capturing a key railroad connection whose loss would cut the Confederacy in half. The raid might have succeeded if not for the train’s conductor, who pursued the hijackers on foot (“this seemed to be funny to some of the crowd,” he said later, “but it wasn’t so to me”) and then by handcar and a series of three engines. The Union men were captured, and eight were hung as spies; some of the survivors were later the first-ever recipients of the Medal of Honor. The chase became a contemporary legend—it’s now best known as the basis of a Buster Keaton film—and Bonds’s account, the first major study in decades, is thoroughly worthy of an expedition that, a Union officer wrote, “had the wildness of a romance.”
"Street Life: Jerry Shore’s New York, and ours" / Adam Gopnik
__ some of the most aesthetically unpersuasive streets in New York City
__ Dignity opens the door to sadness.
__ Shore makes their presence something precise and quietly haunting. They’re our homes, waiting for us as patiently as soldiers’ wives.
<<
