The New Yorker 2015-06-08&15, 2015-08-31
Oct. 26th, 2015 06:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiefoe"Escape from New York" / Zadie Smith
__ Elizabeth scowled and folded her twinkling hands in her lap. “I just don’t see how a person can read at such a time.” “Well, Liz,” Marlon said, laying it on thick, “let me enlighten you. See, I guess I read because I am what you’d call a reader. Because I am interested in the life of the mind. I admit it. I don’t even have a screening room: no, instead I have a library. Imagine that! Imagine that!
__ “We’re all under a lot of strain,” Michael said. His voice was a little wobbly, but he didn’t worry about crying; that didn’t happen easily anymore, not since he’d tattooed around his tear ducts. “This is a very high-stress situation,” he said. He tried to visualize himself as a responsible, humane father, taking his kids on a family road trip. “And we have to try and love each other.” “Thank you, Michael,” Elizabeth said, and for a couple of miles all was peaceful. Then Marlon started in again on the ring. “So these Krupps. They make the weapons that knock off your people, by the millions—and then you buy up their baubles? How does that work?”
"Love Is Blind and Deaf" / Jonathan Safran Foer
__ First they fought passively, then they despaired privately, then they used the new words ambiguously, then pointedly, then they conceived Cain, then they hurled the early creations, then they argued about who owned the pieces of what had never belonged to anybody.
__ They hollered at each other from the opposite sides of the garden to which they’d retreated:
"Go Ask Alice"/ Anthony Lane
__ In practice, this lofted him into the highest ranks of priggery and fuss. There have always been bookish types who run on clockwork, and the noonday of the nineteenth century was their finest hour; regular churchgoing, no doubt, helped to wind them up. Carroll’s existence, however, was regulated with a care that went beyond the bounds of piety.
__ Almost everything about Carroll now lies beyond the Freudian pale. All the more reason, then, to treasure the adventures of Alice on the page, which keep both their counsel and their cool—“strange impromptu stories,” by any reckoning, yet undying. The life of Carroll somehow fades away, leaving nothing but his books, just as a cat, on the branch of a tree, can slowly vanish, bequeathing only a smile.
"Lost Luggage" / Daniyal Mueenuddin
__ Returning home in 1930, having succeeded in the exams for the Indian Civil Service, he snoozed as the boat eased into Bombay Roads, tired perhaps after a farewell party on board, the passengers in fancy dress—the strictures of class and color relaxed by the solvent of travel. Waking, he found his mother leaning over his bunk, her tears of joy falling on his face. He had returned gilded, empowered. The thousand men of the Empire’s Indian Civil Service ruled over a population of three hundred million, and he would rule alongside them.
__ My father would knit his brow in concentration as the pleaders began. Suddenly, Mughla, my father’s notoriously unceremonious hunting guide, would roar from his lookout at the bow, “Gator time, boys!”—or, rather, “Pai chamak di hai!” The pleaders faltered, the injured and injuring parties sat down on the gunwale, crossed their legs, smoked cigarettes, chatted about village affairs. My father leapt off the boat as it touched shore, gun in hand, and made a long detour around the sandbar where the mugger lay, balancing its extreme wiliness against its cold-blooded craving for a hot sunbath. Soon, the boat-bound crew would be treated to the sight of their reverend judge’s bum wiggling above the bushes as he crawled into his emplacement. Kawhong! boomed the .220 Swift, its report echoing over the water, and, if his aim was true, Mughla would rush forward, splashing and paddling as he went, to lay hands on the twitching beast.
__ Now the rivers are polluted and dying, the government forests cut down, groundwater failing. Pervasive corruption has battered all the instruments of governance into hideous shapes. I remember my father, gone these twenty-five years, thoughtful as he concluded this story of Mughla and the crocodiles.
"Quaestio De Centauris" / Primo Levi
__ I could also “invent” things, but nothing too mechanical: Monopoly, the Oreo cookie, the mouse pad, the Dutch tulip craze. Of course, it’s possible that none of these schemes would work. They all require what time travel might not be able to provide: exquisite timing.
__ Elizabeth scowled and folded her twinkling hands in her lap. “I just don’t see how a person can read at such a time.” “Well, Liz,” Marlon said, laying it on thick, “let me enlighten you. See, I guess I read because I am what you’d call a reader. Because I am interested in the life of the mind. I admit it. I don’t even have a screening room: no, instead I have a library. Imagine that! Imagine that!
__ “We’re all under a lot of strain,” Michael said. His voice was a little wobbly, but he didn’t worry about crying; that didn’t happen easily anymore, not since he’d tattooed around his tear ducts. “This is a very high-stress situation,” he said. He tried to visualize himself as a responsible, humane father, taking his kids on a family road trip. “And we have to try and love each other.” “Thank you, Michael,” Elizabeth said, and for a couple of miles all was peaceful. Then Marlon started in again on the ring. “So these Krupps. They make the weapons that knock off your people, by the millions—and then you buy up their baubles? How does that work?”
"Love Is Blind and Deaf" / Jonathan Safran Foer
__ First they fought passively, then they despaired privately, then they used the new words ambiguously, then pointedly, then they conceived Cain, then they hurled the early creations, then they argued about who owned the pieces of what had never belonged to anybody.
__ They hollered at each other from the opposite sides of the garden to which they’d retreated:
"Go Ask Alice"/ Anthony Lane
__ In practice, this lofted him into the highest ranks of priggery and fuss. There have always been bookish types who run on clockwork, and the noonday of the nineteenth century was their finest hour; regular churchgoing, no doubt, helped to wind them up. Carroll’s existence, however, was regulated with a care that went beyond the bounds of piety.
__ Almost everything about Carroll now lies beyond the Freudian pale. All the more reason, then, to treasure the adventures of Alice on the page, which keep both their counsel and their cool—“strange impromptu stories,” by any reckoning, yet undying. The life of Carroll somehow fades away, leaving nothing but his books, just as a cat, on the branch of a tree, can slowly vanish, bequeathing only a smile.
"Lost Luggage" / Daniyal Mueenuddin
__ Returning home in 1930, having succeeded in the exams for the Indian Civil Service, he snoozed as the boat eased into Bombay Roads, tired perhaps after a farewell party on board, the passengers in fancy dress—the strictures of class and color relaxed by the solvent of travel. Waking, he found his mother leaning over his bunk, her tears of joy falling on his face. He had returned gilded, empowered. The thousand men of the Empire’s Indian Civil Service ruled over a population of three hundred million, and he would rule alongside them.
__ My father would knit his brow in concentration as the pleaders began. Suddenly, Mughla, my father’s notoriously unceremonious hunting guide, would roar from his lookout at the bow, “Gator time, boys!”—or, rather, “Pai chamak di hai!” The pleaders faltered, the injured and injuring parties sat down on the gunwale, crossed their legs, smoked cigarettes, chatted about village affairs. My father leapt off the boat as it touched shore, gun in hand, and made a long detour around the sandbar where the mugger lay, balancing its extreme wiliness against its cold-blooded craving for a hot sunbath. Soon, the boat-bound crew would be treated to the sight of their reverend judge’s bum wiggling above the bushes as he crawled into his emplacement. Kawhong! boomed the .220 Swift, its report echoing over the water, and, if his aim was true, Mughla would rush forward, splashing and paddling as he went, to lay hands on the twitching beast.
__ Now the rivers are polluted and dying, the government forests cut down, groundwater failing. Pervasive corruption has battered all the instruments of governance into hideous shapes. I remember my father, gone these twenty-five years, thoughtful as he concluded this story of Mughla and the crocodiles.
"Quaestio De Centauris" / Primo Levi
- It was a time, never to be repeated, of wild, ecstatic fecundity, in which the entire universe felt love, so intensely that it nearly returned to chaos.
- Those were the days when the earth itself fornicated with the sky, when everything germinated and everything was fruitful. Not only every marriage but every union, every contact, every encounter, even fleeting, even between different species, even between beasts and stones, even between plants and stones, was fertile, and produced offspring not in a few months but in a few days. The sea of warm mud, which concealed the earth’s cold, prudish face, was one boundless nuptial bed, all its recesses boiling over with desire and teeming with jubilant germs.
- This second creation was the true creation, because, according to what is passed down among the centaurs, there is no other way to explain certain similarities, certain convergences observed by all. Why is the dolphin similar to the fish, and yet gives birth and nurses its offspring? Because it’s the child of a tuna and a cow. Where do butterflies get their delicate colors and their ability to fly? They are the children of a flower and a fly. Tortoises are the children of a frog and a rock. Bats of an owl and a mouse. Conchs of a snail and a polished pebble. Hippopotami of a horse and a river. Vultures of a worm and an owl. And the big whales, the leviathans—how to explain their immense mass? Their wooden bones, their black and oily skin, and their fiery breath are living testimony to a venerable union in which—even when the end of all flesh had been decreed—that same primordial mud got greedy hold of the ark’s feminine keel, made of gopher wood and covered inside and out with shiny pitch.
- find it painful to write this story. It is a story from my youth, and I feel that in writing it I am expelling it from myself, and that later I will feel bereft of something strong and pure.
- Trachi drew me aside and said this: “Oh, my dearest friend, my hour has come. I have fallen in love. That woman has got inside of me, and possesses me. I desire to see her and hear her, perhaps even touch her, and nothing else; I therefore desire something impossible. I am reduced to one point: there is nothing left of me except this desire. I am changing, I have changed, I have become another.”
__ I could also “invent” things, but nothing too mechanical: Monopoly, the Oreo cookie, the mouse pad, the Dutch tulip craze. Of course, it’s possible that none of these schemes would work. They all require what time travel might not be able to provide: exquisite timing.
________________________________________________
"The Big Dig" / Elif Batuman
- That’s when they found the remains of a Neolithic dwelling, dating from around 6000 B.C. It was previously unknown that anyone had lived on the site of the old city before around 1300 B.C. The excavators, attempting to avoid traces of Istanbul’s human history, had ended up finding an extra five thousand years of it.
- A museum and an archeological park are under construction to showcase the findings, and, in an apt figure for the seemingly endless nature of the Yenikapı project, it seems likely that their construction will turn up even more shipwrecks.
- Wood can absorb eight times its mass in water. If allowed to dry naturally, it cracks and warps beyond recognition.
- The ships really did resemble surgical subjects, their rib cages opened up as each was measured, recorded, and documented by graduate students. Archeology, Kocabaş explained, is a destructive science. The site has to be recorded scrupulously, because the excavation will annihilate it.
- From the elephant bones we passed to the skulls of dancing bears. The cubs’ skulls showed compression fractures, from having been hit during training. The adult skulls had marks on the muzzles, from having been bound shut. Dancing bears had been a popular Byzantine entertainment. Empress Theodora’s father was a bear trainer.
- He was right: archeology is ideology, especially in modern Turkey... Kemal understood that, if Turkish-speaking Muslims were going to retain any land in the former Ottoman Empire, they would have to come up with a unifying mythology of Turkishness, based on the Western European ideals of ethnic nationalism, positivism, and secularism. Adopting the surname Atatürk (Father Turk), he quickly set about inventing a new national identity. Of course, it couldn’t seem invented; that’s where archeology came in.
- the historian Clive Foss enumerated other colorful tenets of the theory. In Mesopotamia, “Sumerian Turks” drained swamps and developed a written language; Turkish Thracians founded Troy. Turkish Lydians migrated to Italy, became Etruscans, and so more or less established Rome. The Minoans of Crete, having come from Anatolia, were basically Turks. The Buddha was a Turk; so was the third-century Roman emperor Maximinus.
- Tansev said that he had been most impressed by what a big difference it made whether you uncovered something Byzantine or Roman. Either would mess up your project, but Byzantine artifacts could eventually be moved. “Roman things can’t be touched,” he said. “With Byzantium, you can find a way around it. But when it comes to Rome—condolences.”
- Before freeze-drying, each piece of wood must be saturated in a forty-five-per-cent solution of polyethylene glycol, a waxy compound that replaces the water inside the cell walls, preventing shrinking or warping. Because the waterlogged wood is too delicate to be dumped straight into a forty-five-per-cent solution, the concentration has to be increased by five-per-cent increments every month or two. Getting all the pieces of a ship to the full concentration can take years. During the actual freeze-drying, which takes from one to four months, the remaining water in the wood freezes solid, and then, under very low pressure, sublimates to a gas, bypassing the liquid phase.
"The Fearful and the Frustrated" / Evan Osnos
__ He starred in “The Apprentice” for fourteen seasons, cultivating a lordly persona and a squint that combined Clint Eastwood on the high plains and Derek Zoolander on the runway.
"The Terrible Teens" / Elizabeth Kolbert
__ According to Steinberg, adults spend their lives with wads of cotton in their metaphorical noses. Adolescents, by contrast, are designed to sniff out treats at a hundred paces. During childhood, the nucleus accumbens, which is sometimes called the “pleasure center,” grows. It reaches its maximum extent in the teen-age brain; then it starts to shrink. This enlargement of the pleasure center occurs in concert with other sensation-enhancing changes. As kids enter puberty, their brains sprout more dopamine receptors.
Alex Ross:
__ William Schuman, whose bitterly beautiful Eighth Symphony deserves to be heard as often as anything by his contemporary Copland; or Bohuslav Martinů, whose Third Symphony, from 1944, matches the urgency of Shostakovich’s wartime utterances while avoiding their longueurs; or Panufnik, a greatly gifted Pole who, during the Communist period, took refuge in Britain and struggled to win international renown.
__ Rubbra’s Fourth Symphony, a pastoral British work from 1942, has one of the most magical beginnings in the literature: over gently pulsing dominant sevenths in the winds and horns, strings sustain a simple, triadic motif that bends down like the wings of a wide-spanned bird in flight.
__ He starred in “The Apprentice” for fourteen seasons, cultivating a lordly persona and a squint that combined Clint Eastwood on the high plains and Derek Zoolander on the runway.
"The Terrible Teens" / Elizabeth Kolbert
__ According to Steinberg, adults spend their lives with wads of cotton in their metaphorical noses. Adolescents, by contrast, are designed to sniff out treats at a hundred paces. During childhood, the nucleus accumbens, which is sometimes called the “pleasure center,” grows. It reaches its maximum extent in the teen-age brain; then it starts to shrink. This enlargement of the pleasure center occurs in concert with other sensation-enhancing changes. As kids enter puberty, their brains sprout more dopamine receptors.
Alex Ross:
__ William Schuman, whose bitterly beautiful Eighth Symphony deserves to be heard as often as anything by his contemporary Copland; or Bohuslav Martinů, whose Third Symphony, from 1944, matches the urgency of Shostakovich’s wartime utterances while avoiding their longueurs; or Panufnik, a greatly gifted Pole who, during the Communist period, took refuge in Britain and struggled to win international renown.
__ Rubbra’s Fourth Symphony, a pastoral British work from 1942, has one of the most magical beginnings in the literature: over gently pulsing dominant sevenths in the winds and horns, strings sustain a simple, triadic motif that bends down like the wings of a wide-spanned bird in flight.
