The New Yorker, 2008-03-17

[fiefoe]

Hendrik Hertzberg: McCain.. pair(s) up positions like Noah bring animals aboard the ark.

"The Artistic Life: Last Lecture" / Calvin Tomkins

"The Real Work" / Adam Gopnik

• The magician had walked over to a wall where a tiny book was kept under a false cover. "It's Malini's Erdnase!" he said, as one might say, "It's Lincoln's Bible!"
• From the start, the history of magic-as-fun is interwoven with the history of magic-as-fraud, more or less the way the history of chemistry is bound up with the history of alchemy.
• Vernon grasped that there's an imbalance between the spectator's experience and the performer's greater even than the normal imbalance in the arts between the insider and the outsider.
• Like the Polish Hasidim, whose move toward spontaneous religion kept them in the ordinary clothes of the eighteenth century, magicians wore a costume that had first been meant as camouflage. The task of making magic seem natural must be perpetually renewed.
• All grownup craft depends on sustaining a frozen moment from childhood: scientists, it's said, are forever four years old, wide-eyed and self-centered; writers are forever eight, over-aware and indignant.
• Only by a command of intellectual empathy can the magician lead the viewer down an explanatory highway from which there is no exit, or better, from which there are six exits, all of them blocked. Magic is imagination working together with dexterity to persuade experience how limited its experience really is, the heart working with the fingers to remind the head how little it knows.
• Teller: "With magic what you see collides with what you know. That's why magic, even when merely executed, ends up having intellectual content. It's intrinsic to the form."
• The Too Perfect theory... reminds us that, whatever the context, the empathetic interchange between minds is satisfying only when it is "dynamic," unfinished, unresolved. Friendships, flirtations, even love affairs depend, like magic tricks, on a constant exchange of imcomplete but tantalizing information. We are always reducing the claim or raising the proof... The trick is to renew the possibilities, to keep them from becoming schematized, to let them be imperfect.
  

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