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The New Yorker, 2007-11-05
Dec. 13th, 2007 09:41 pm"Postcard From California: The Fires" / Dana Goodyear
__ In enlightened California fashion, bilingual services, acupuncture, and kosher food were offered (at the Qualcomm Stadium).
"Here To There Dept.: A Bird’s Life" / David Berreby
__ If you happen to land in actual woodland by an actual river in the Bronx, you could be snatched, alien-abduction style, by intelligent beings. Beings who then weigh and measure you, poke you with a needle, and maybe scan you with a super-magnet. And blow hard on your chest. (They always do that.)
__ Then he put the bird head down in a piece of white PVC pipe (“standard Home Depot issue,’’ he said). Sticking out were the bird’s tail and its wire-thin feet, which stirred slightly—strange flowers in a strange vase.
"Future Reading" / Anthony Grafton
__ When Erasmus told the story of Pandora, he said that she opened not a jar, as in the original version of the story, by the Greek poet Hesiod, but a box. In every European language except Italian, Pandora’s box became proverbial—a canard made ubiquitous by the power of a new information technology.
"Neptune’s Navy" / Raffi Khatchadourian
__ Watson said, “It’s all human drama. That’s all anybody’s interested in, human drama. Nobody is questioning the whales that are dying out here.” Then he muttered, “Hominids, man, goddam hominids.”)
__ He wrote, “I was born on December 2, 1950, in the hereditary lands of the Huron on the north shore of Lake Ontario,” which was his way of saying that he was born in Toronto.
__ He contends that there are only two social currents that really matter, anthropocentrism and biocentrism, and they function in his thinking much like a Marxist dialectic: the former being a dominant and amoral world view that, fixated on the interests of one species, is inherently unstable, violent, and destined to collapse; the latter being a view that is held by a vanguard, egalitarian and just, and that, representing every species’ interests, is destined to triumph.
"All Souls -The Frida Kahlo cult" / Peter Schjeldahl
__ Kahlo’s self-portraits are about her gaze, as subject matter, technique, and content. They dramatize sheer attentiveness. They tell us exactly what it’s like to be Frida Kahlo, with, I believe, a superbly indifferent confidence that we will not understand.
__ T. S. Eliot articulated the truth, regarding all successful art, of a dissociation of “the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” Make the man a woman, and Kahlo becomes singular for having engaged both parties at once—and only them. Looking at the pictures, you’re not there.
__ The paintings are matte and grayish, drinking and withholding light. (Their display calls for intense illumination—that of the Mexican sun, say.)
Joan Acocella: Art is personal; it makes people think about their secret lives.
'Ballerina Incarnate'
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br'er_Rabbit
Portfolio: Hansel and Gretel
<<
__ In enlightened California fashion, bilingual services, acupuncture, and kosher food were offered (at the Qualcomm Stadium).
"Here To There Dept.: A Bird’s Life" / David Berreby
__ If you happen to land in actual woodland by an actual river in the Bronx, you could be snatched, alien-abduction style, by intelligent beings. Beings who then weigh and measure you, poke you with a needle, and maybe scan you with a super-magnet. And blow hard on your chest. (They always do that.)
__ Then he put the bird head down in a piece of white PVC pipe (“standard Home Depot issue,’’ he said). Sticking out were the bird’s tail and its wire-thin feet, which stirred slightly—strange flowers in a strange vase.
"Future Reading" / Anthony Grafton
__ When Erasmus told the story of Pandora, he said that she opened not a jar, as in the original version of the story, by the Greek poet Hesiod, but a box. In every European language except Italian, Pandora’s box became proverbial—a canard made ubiquitous by the power of a new information technology.
"Neptune’s Navy" / Raffi Khatchadourian
__ Watson said, “It’s all human drama. That’s all anybody’s interested in, human drama. Nobody is questioning the whales that are dying out here.” Then he muttered, “Hominids, man, goddam hominids.”)
__ He wrote, “I was born on December 2, 1950, in the hereditary lands of the Huron on the north shore of Lake Ontario,” which was his way of saying that he was born in Toronto.
__ He contends that there are only two social currents that really matter, anthropocentrism and biocentrism, and they function in his thinking much like a Marxist dialectic: the former being a dominant and amoral world view that, fixated on the interests of one species, is inherently unstable, violent, and destined to collapse; the latter being a view that is held by a vanguard, egalitarian and just, and that, representing every species’ interests, is destined to triumph.
"All Souls -The Frida Kahlo cult" / Peter Schjeldahl
__ Kahlo’s self-portraits are about her gaze, as subject matter, technique, and content. They dramatize sheer attentiveness. They tell us exactly what it’s like to be Frida Kahlo, with, I believe, a superbly indifferent confidence that we will not understand.
__ T. S. Eliot articulated the truth, regarding all successful art, of a dissociation of “the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” Make the man a woman, and Kahlo becomes singular for having engaged both parties at once—and only them. Looking at the pictures, you’re not there.
__ The paintings are matte and grayish, drinking and withholding light. (Their display calls for intense illumination—that of the Mexican sun, say.)
Joan Acocella: Art is personal; it makes people think about their secret lives.
'Ballerina Incarnate'
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br'er_Rabbit
Portfolio: Hansel and Gretel
<<
