The New Yorker, 2008-03-31, b

[fiefoe]

"The Wonder Years" / Peter Hessler

• "We don't say we 'bought'," she said. "We say we 'invited' the statues to come here."
• The most impressive gift of the Communist Party by far was a three-foot-wide photograph of Denver, Colorado. The frame was electric: digital displays featured the time, the date, and the temperature of the room. Wei Ziqi hung it next to his wife's Buddhist shrine.
• Pandas are the rarest beast of all. That was supposedly Deng Xiaoping's favorite brand.
• In any case, Chinese children adapt to the constant censure, and negative remarks rolled off him like water from a duck. His instinct for self-criticism was so good that I wondered if it was inherited: both father and son pointed to a lack of enthusiasm for physical labor.

"Subprime Suspect" / John Cassidy
__ As the former senior manager explained, "It sounds strange now, but on a trillion-dollar balance sheet thirty billion dollars is not very much. We had other things going on." {The beauty of leverage.}

"Pomegranate Princess" / Amanda Fortini
__ Napoleon is a sort of household hero... 'Honey, I forgot to tell you, we're going to have to put a steel rebar in the basement to shore up the floor when we bring (the statue) in.'

"Master and Commander: Remembering David Lean" / Anthony Lane

• Grandeur is a far from simple blessing, for the filmmaker as for the politician. It is nagged by accusations of bombast and fears of emptiness. Comedy sniggers in its shadows. Yet those who try to brush it away from the history of cinema will find themselves scratching that history beyond repair.
• One “match incident” leads to another: Lawrence, stuck in Cairo halfway through the First World War, and conscious of a place, not far away, where the fate of nations, not to mention his own private destiny, will be decided, holds a match up close and blows it out. We cut, without ado, to the desert at dawn, and so to the slow explosion of red gold on the horizon’s rim: God lighting the first match of the day.
• In the desert, he was nearing godhead (and the costume designers clad him in ever more translucent robes as the film proceeded, to heighten the angelic sheen), whereas here we remember how he seemed at the start: a fey and dandified dreamer, possibly a fool.

"Holy Man" / Pankaj Mishra
__ “For the first time in history,” Hannah Arendt wrote in 1957, “all peoples on earth have a common present. . . . Every country has become the almost immediate neighbor of every other country, and every man feels the shock of events which take place at the other end of the globe.” Arendt feared that this new “unity of the world” would be a largely negative phenomenon if it wasn’t accompanied by the “renunciation, not of one’s own tradition and national past, but of the binding authority and universal validity which tradition and past have always claimed.”

"Tristan and Two Isoldes" / Alex Ross
__ The official canon of opera debacles includes such episodes as Leo Slezak missing the swan boat in “Lohengrin” and asking, “When does the next swan leave?”;... and a heavyset Tosca jumping off the parapet and bouncing back up from a hidden trampoline (an apocryphal but irresistible story). {Paging Eva Ibbotson...}

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