The New Yorker, 2006-09-25

"Dept. of Everlasting Peace: Swami" / Nick Paumgarten
__ He began to blow. The sound of the conch joined that of the brass and of the sirens in the street. The driver spun around, beaming.

"Bag Lady" / Andrea Lee

• bags as large as Christmas turkeys, groomed and bedizened, glistening and scaly as pet dragons, exuding, in their reptilian complacency, a subtle air of menace.
• We have been living in a gilded age of handbags: a rococo time of profligacy, opulence, heights of stylistic genius and depths of vulgarity, but above all, a time of exponential proliferation of vitality.
• The Baguette begat the Prada bowling bag, the reborn Jackie bag by Gucci, the Saint Laurent Mombasa,.. the Dior Detective.
• Michael Burke said that his boss was like a man with a cellar full of rare vintages, each one with its own flavor and timetable, and that he sensed when one fashion house was ready to pop.
  

Rafael Sabatini - "Scaramouche"

"The Huntress" / Larissa MacFarquhar

• as though it were a kind of timeless spirit that possessed female infants (foreign ones), setting them of on a life course that led from bewitching nymphet to Madame Blavatsky and wrought all kinds of thrilling damage in between.
• Leon adored Diane, smothered her with love, and thus, she says, forever freed her from romantic insecurity.
• "American fashion still revolves around Jackie O., and there was no one prissier," ... Von Furstenberge clothing is the opposite - nothing that holds its own shape,
• "In order to pack well, you have to visualize what you are going to do, where you are going to do it, and how you are going to project yourself."
• "Now, I wasn't chopped liver, I was the chairman of Paramount at thirty-three, I wasn't a shoe clerk, but Diane was Diane!"
• an exceedingly tycoonish existence
  

"I Remember MOMA" / Calvin Tomkins
__ awakening to a world of visual shocks and mental options that we hadn't run into anywhere else

"Dress For Excess" / Judith Thurman

• beautiful, trapped girls, who belong to a generation too cynical to unite in rebellion and too cool to unite in conformity
• The gravediggers,.. were taking a lunch break, so they left the Queen's head and body lying on the grass, giving a young sculptor- Marie Grosholtz, who later became Madame Tussaud - an opportunity to take a wax imprint for a death mask.
• Marie Antoinette, an ordinary woman whose life is infinitely more complex than she was
• The pouf was a cross between a topicary and a Christmas tree, and each creation.. had a sentimental or political theme. fashionable ladies carried long-handled head-scratchers).. The Queen wore a pouf a l'inoculation to publicize her triumph in persuading the King to be vaccinated against smallpox.
• It was left to Flaubert to democratize the wisdom of Saint-Just. His works insist that no one is human innocently.
  

Freud: The most ardent wish of children is to grow up and get as big a share of everything as the grown-ups; they are hard to satisfy; do not know the meaning of "enough".

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