The New Yorker, 2007-01-08

[fiefoe]

“Die Weltliteratur” / Milan Kundera

• A nation's possessiveness toward its artists works as a small-context terrorism that reduces the entire meaning of a work to the role it plays in its homeland.
• The strange anguish ..: that displacement into a context that was not mine felt like a deportation.
• In Central Europe, the situation was different: opposition to the ecstatic, romantic sentimental musical tradition led the modernism of a few geniuses, the most original ones, toward the art that is the privileged sphere of analysis, lucidity, irony; that is toward the novel.
• What is the French word that expresses the worst aesthetic reprobation the way the notion of kitsch expresses it for me? It finally comes to me: it is the word _vulgaire, vulgarite.

"Open Secrets" / Malcolm Gladwell

• Puzzles are “transmitter-dependent”; they turn on what we are told. Mysteries are “receiver dependent”; they turn on the skills of the listener,
• One of the critical clues about Enron’s condition lay in the fact that it paid no income tax in four of its last five years.
• In an age of increasing financial complexity the “disclosure paradigm”—the idea that the more a company tells us about its business, the better off we are—has become an anachronism.
• Mysteries demand experience and insight. Woodward and Bernstein would never have broken the Enron story.

"Nights At the Opera" / Joan Acocella
__ Italy was famous for its improvisatori, proto-rappers who, given a theme and a rhythm, could declaim, extempore, several hundred lines of verse at a stretch, to musical accompaniment.
__ Reportedly, he stood with his chest thrust so far forward that he had to put his cane behind his back and lean on it so as not to fall over.

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