The New Yorker, 2008-07-07&14

[fiefoe]

"Back Pages Dept.: The Chill" / Nick Paumgarten
__ At quitting time, he’d go to the printer’s to pick up the next day’s racing form, commute home (wife, children, house—the full catastrophe), study the form, pick two or three horses, and call them in the next morning.

"Romeo, Romeo" / Joan Acocella
__ Christian Science .. to which Prokofiev and his wife converted
__ "I'm an enemy of the innovative{?} lift," he answered. "It looks like ice dancing to me. It also looks like kidnapping - violence against women."

"The Back of the World" / Adam Gopnik

• Writing in London... where mass literacy had created a mass audience without yet entirely removing respect for intellect, they made themselves as much as they made their sentences. (... they lent prestige to a new mass medium that hadn't yet learned how easily it could get along without them.)
• ... the beautiful is always small, that we cannot have a clear picture in white light of abstractions, but only of a row of houses at a certain time of day.
• The chief bourgeois vices are hypocrisy and homogenization. (Chesterton is) the first strong mind that saw something evil in the levelling of little pleasures.
• A Frenchman or an Italian, can see the Catholic Church as a normally bureaucratic human institution, the way patriot Americans see the post office, recognizing the frailty... without doubting its necessity or its ability to deliver the message.
• There are two tectonic shifts in English writing. One occurs in the early 18th century, when Addison and Steele being The Spectator and the stop-and-start Elizabethan-Stuart prose becomes the smooth, Latinate, elegantly wrought ironic style... Gibbon made it sly and ornate; Johnson gave it sinew and muscle; Dickens mocks it at elaborate comic length.
• The new style dethroned the old orotundity as surely as Addison had killed off the old asymmetry... Writers like Shaw .. depened on a kind of comic and complicit hyperbole: every statement is an overstatement.. The new style prized understatement, to be filled in by the reader.
• "The very word skyscraper is an admirable example of an American lie."

"Symphony of Millions" / Alex Ross

• when the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci presented a clavichord to Wanli
• guqin... is music of intimate address and subtle power that is able to suggest immense spaces; skittering figures and arching melodies give way to sustained, slowly decaying tones and long, meditative pauses.
• A little later, I heard a wistful melody coming from an unseen bamboo flute, and went in search of its source, hoping for another revelation. After making my way through a maze of pine trees, I found a man of great age and haunted visage, playing the theme from “The Godfather.”

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