The New Yorker, 2006-02-27 +

"Backstory: New Man" / Tad Friend
__ "The light is amazing, magical - the clarity of its reflections, the way it ripples and fades. Every little window gains importance!"

"Suitable For Framing" / David Sedaris

"My Father's Tears" / John Updike

• The lone bathroom was a long room, its plaster walls and wooden floor both bare, that was haunted by a small but intense rainbow, which moved around the walls as the sun in the course of the day glinted at a changing angle off the bevelled edge of the mirror on the medicine cabinet. When we troubled to heat up enough water on the kerosene stove for a daylight bath, the prismatically generated rainbow kept the bather company; it quivered and bobbed when footsteps or a breath of wind made the house tremble. To me this Ariel-like phenomenon was the magical child of Unitarian austerity, symbolic of the lofty attitude that sought out a primitive farmhouse as a relief from well-furnished urban comfort.
• It is easy to love people in memory; the hard trick is to love them when they are there, in front of you.
• My mother was, in my father's bemused phrase, "throwing an atmosphere".
• I never noticed what a distinct Pennsylvania accent my mother had. When we were face to face, her voice sounded as transparent as my own.

"When In Rome" / Paul Goldberger
__ In the English landscape tradition, the folly was not a trivial object but a noble act of historical connoisseurship, playing off against a great manor house that was designed in a more contemporary style.
__ Little slabs of onyx are set atop each column, forming modernist versions of capitals. The arrangement of the onynx layers varies with each column, and the effect is of piles of books stacked at random atop cylinders. A beautiful flourish, it's as subtle, and as gently witty, a comment on the dialectic between modernism and Classicism as I've ever seen.

 

----2008-06-30----

"The Itch" / Atul Gawande
__ Aquagenic pruritus is recurrent, intense, diffuse itching upon getting out of a bath or shower,.. it's a symptom of polycythemia vera, a rare condition in which the body produces too many red blood cells.
__ Children have used phantom fingers to count and solve arithmetic problems.
__ Unlike, say, the nerve fibres for pain each of which covers a millimetre-sized territory, a single itch fibre can pick up an itchy sensation more than three inches away. The fibres also turned out to have extraordinary low conduction speeds.

Joan Acocella: Nobody told Fra Angelico that he should stop painting the Virgin.

"Big Kills" / Anthony Lane
__ Does he make a cup of coffee? My best guess, based on the evidence of the film, is that he tosses a handful of beans toward the ceiling, shoots them individually into a fine powder, leaves it hanging in the air, runs downstairs, breaks open a fire hydrant with his head, carefully directs the jet of water through the window of his apartment, sets fire to the building, then stands patiently with his mug amid the blazing ruins to collect the precious percolated drops.

----2008-09-08----

"Why Me" / Ian Parker
__ Donaghy has the calm joy of someone who knows that nothing matters in life but ambition;

----2008-05-19----

"Largo Nights" / Dana Goodyear
__ "She's a complicated shadow, that one," he said.

Jon Brion - "I Believe She's Lying"

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