The New Yorker, 2007-01-15

[fiefoe]

"Playoffs" / Shalom Auslander

• Some days he hated us so much that he killed us; other days he let other people kill us. We call these days "holidays." On Purim, we remember how the Persians tried to kill us. On Passover, we remember how the Egyptians tried to kill us. On Hanukkah, we remember how the Greeks tried to kill us.
• It drove me mad that I couldn't afford sanity,
• (Sitting on the lawn was prohibited, because the grass could dye your clothes - Dyeing, Category No. 15. Some held that it was also a violation of Plowing, Category No. 2, and should the grass be pulled out of the ground by the heel of your shoe, Reaping, Category No. 3.)

"Expectations" / Katherine Boo
__ But to have expectations, it seemed to him, a person had to have a sense that his life was in his control.

"An Acquiring Eye" / Rebecca Meade
__ (Ithad been suggested a couple of years earlier that Lauder might be nominated as the Ambassador to Jamaica, but Estee Lauder objected. "Who in Washington wants my Ronald dead?" she asked Roy Cohn at the time. "My friend Sarah Spencer-Churchill was raped in Jamaica! My Ronald is not going to a crazy country like Jamaica.")
__ Cafe Sabarsky-- its authenticity compromised only by fierce air-condition {so true!} and a ban on smoking.

"God’s Undertaker" / Adam Kirsch

• The virtues of his novels are not the ones we commonly look for in fiction. What one remembers is not dialogue or the evolution of character but brilliantly orchestrated scenes, detached and nearly emblematic in their simplicity.
• Hardy, one of the most genuinely erotic of novelists, didn’t need to portray sex to make the reader swoon. He could do it with a sword blade, as when Sergeant Troy woos Bathsheba Everdene by demonstrating his prowess:    In an instant the atmosphere was transformed to Bathsheba’s eyes. Beams of light caught from the low sun’s rays, above, around, in front of her, well-nigh shut out earth and heaven—all emitted in the marvellous evolutions of Troy’s reflecting blade, which seemed everywhere at once, and yet nowhere specially. These circling gleams were accompanied by a keen rush that was almost a whistling—also springing from all sides of her at once. In short, she was enclosed in a firmament of light, and of sharp hisses, resembling a sky-full of meteors close at hand.

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