The New Yorker, 2007-10-22

[fiefoe]

"The Corrections" / Adam Gopnik

• If Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, hadn't labored over their "skeleton key" to "Finnegans Wake"..
• The compact edition adheres to a specific idea of what a good novel ought to be: the contemporary aesthetic of the realist pschological novel... a clean story, inhabited by plausible characters - the "taut, spare, driving" narrative beloved of Sunday reviewers.
• What one feels in most director's cuts is not so much addition, new things brought in, as mere chest expansion, the same number of breaths taken more slowly.
• We learn that the director drew up a "flow chart" of gumchewing, marking the dramatic trajector on which the Brody character does and does not chew gum, and thereby revealing his moral growth.
• The commentary provides the film with the complicated point of view, the detachment, the alienation, the odd play of foreground and background, the sad tone of attentive unease and retrospective remorse that we associate with, well, the classic modern novel... Dr. Frankenstein and his monster together are the subject of art;
  

"The Well-tempered Web" / Alex Ross
    somewhere toward the middle of the last movement, I began to feel the words that Messiaen marks in the part, I began to hear them, feel them as a "mantra": extatique, paradisiaque. And maybe more importantly, I began to have visions while I was playing, snapshots of my own life (such that I had to remind myself to look at the notes, play the notes!): people's eyes, mostly, expressions of love, moments of total and absolute tenderness. (This is sentimental, too personal: I know. How can you write about this piece without becoming over-emotional?) I felt that same sense of outpouring ("pouring over") that comes when you just have to touch someone, when what you feel makes you pour out of your own body, when you are briefly no longer yourself -- and at that moment I was still playing the chords, still somehow playing the damn piano. And each chord is even more beautiful than the last; they are pulsing, hypnotic, reverberant... each chord seemed to pile on something that was already ready to collapse, something too beautiful to be stable... and when your own playing boomerangs on you and begins to "move yourself," to touch you emotionally, you have entered a very dangerous place. Luckily, the piece was almost over... When I got offstage I had to breathe, hold myself in, talk myself down.

"Age of Reason" / Arthur Krystal
__ Among his areas of expertise are French and German literature, music, education, ghost stories, detective fiction, language, and etymology. Barzun has examined Poe as proofreader, Abraham Lincoln as stylist, Diderot as satirist, and Liszt as reader; he has burnished the reputations of Thomas Beddoes, James Agate, and John Jay Chapman;

"Man Behind the Curtain" / Rebecca Mead

__ "At the time, Horowitz ate only Dover sole, and so I organized these various ambassadors to supply his food needs. The British Ambassador was assigned Dover-sole responsibilities; the Italian Ambassador was responsible for his fresh-asparagus needs."
__ At one point, shortly before Horowitz died, he was in a very expansive, affectionate mood, and he said to me, ‘You know, you’re like a member of our family. I don’t think you should call me Mr. Horowitz anymore. You should call me Maestro.’ ”

"Stealing Life" / Margaret Talbot

• "Every single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less. We are in a post-industrial age. We don’t need as many of us as we once did."
• No other television drama, it seems safe to say, features an actor whom one of the show’s lead writers helped put in prison with a thirty-four-year sentence.
• Once, a man pressed a package of heroin into the hands of Andre Royo... saying, “Man, you need a fix more than I do.” Royo refers to that moment as his “street Oscar.”
  

Sasha Frere-Jones: make a synthesizer sound like a dolphin fixing a tractor (tough but doable)
John Lahr: Once... the taboos (are) lifted, high camp lost some of its combative mischief. License bred laziness.
David Denby: A male star also needed something contradictory or unresolved in his face, for without that he could never have been more than a model.

Grand Valley State U. New Music Ensemble - Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians"
Naxos online; Sharp Centre; Malcolm Bradbury

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