The New Yorker 2015-09-07，2015-09-28
Nov. 30th, 2015 05:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiefoeIan Frazier: The amateur remembered a long-ago time when “pieces of eight” had been for him a term of untrammelled romance.
"An Exile in the Corn Belt" / Ruth Margalit
"The Death and Life of Atlantic City" / Nick Paumgarten
__ For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet.
__ This passage, like so many in his great essays, describes itself, its own idiosyncratic “architecture.” This is what Emerson meant when he called for a literature of “insight and not of tradition.” Each sentence is an innovation, “a new thing.”
Mamie Gummer: "I have a very small head,' she said. "Why is my head so small?"
"The Avenger" / Patrick Radden Keefe
__ Like the coroner in a police procedural, Dornstein derives such clinical satisfaction from his work that he can narrate the grisliest findings with cheerful detachment. Motioning at a scattering of pushpins some distance from the rest, he said, “They were the youngest, smallest children. If you look at the physics of it, they were carried by the wind.”
__ Dornstein quoted Elie Wiesel: “Sometimes it happens that we travel for a long time without knowing that we have made the long journey solely to pronounce a certain word, a certain phrase, in a certain place. The meeting of the place and the word is a rare accomplishment.” It might seem abstract and philosophical, Dornstein said, but this is the way he came to understand his role as avenger. He surveyed books about Jews tracking down Nazis, and Israelis hunting the terrorists who attacked the 1972 Munich Olympics. <> His reckoning, he told me, would come not in an act of retribution but in the delivery of a message: “Twenty-five years ago, on a day of your choosing, you put a bomb in an airplane, and the course of my life changed. Now, on a day of my choosing, I will come to your home and I will knock on your door and say, ‘I was on the other side of that act.’ ”
"Pop for Misfits" / Kelefa Sanneh
__ which was a complicated sort of compliment. “Oblivion” was a great choice to top the Pitchfork list precisely because it was not an obvious choice.
__ She likes to perform in front of a powerful fan, which blows back her hair to create a small-budget version of a big-budget music video. “I’m shocked that more people don’t use fans,” she says.
"The Art of Witness" / James Wood
http://popsonnet.tumblr.com/ :
As the critic William Empson wisely remarked, what Shakespeare continually shows is that life is essentially inadequate to the human spirit. Our truths are too meagre and mammal to rise to our hopes of what life ought to be.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/08/29/pop_sonnets_tumblr_makes_shakespeare_sonnets_out_of_pop_songs_video.html
http://www.metafilter.com/142060/Young-Thomas-Is-A-Longshoreman-By-Trade
http://popsonnet.tumblr.com/post/88602462362/get-lucky
"An Exile in the Corn Belt" / Ruth Margalit
"The Death and Life of Atlantic City" / Nick Paumgarten
- When word gets out that a city is on the skids, people seem eager to imagine post-apocalyptic desolation, a rusting ruin at Ozymandian remove from the glory days. But American cities don’t seem to die that way. They keep sopping up tax dollars and risk capital, thwarting big ideas and emergency relief, chewing up opportunists and champions.
- Atlantic City, formerly a breeding ground for big ideas, was now a tar pit—trapping financial mastodons and big-eyed dreamers, whether or not their intentions were pure, as the capricious gods of commerce looked on.
- Ask yourself: Who is the villain of this story?” Capital or labor? Germany or Greece? Depends on whom you talk to.
- As weeks passed, Crandon made promises that he’d soon hold the keys to Revel, and then the deal would recede again: Zeno’s paradox down the shore.
- At the end of June, Crandon texted me to say that his deal with Straub was off. “Greed and evil have destroyed A.C.” He explained, “What happened is we got circumvented.” Straub, apparently, had cut him out of the loop and gone directly to the Chinese. He had come to see the potential of junkets from overseas. Crandon sent photos of Tara Lordi in Shanghai with a Chinese man, whom he still, vestigially, called “my partner”:
__ For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet.
__ This passage, like so many in his great essays, describes itself, its own idiosyncratic “architecture.” This is what Emerson meant when he called for a literature of “insight and not of tradition.” Each sentence is an innovation, “a new thing.”
_________________________________________
Mamie Gummer: "I have a very small head,' she said. "Why is my head so small?"
"The Avenger" / Patrick Radden Keefe
__ Like the coroner in a police procedural, Dornstein derives such clinical satisfaction from his work that he can narrate the grisliest findings with cheerful detachment. Motioning at a scattering of pushpins some distance from the rest, he said, “They were the youngest, smallest children. If you look at the physics of it, they were carried by the wind.”
__ Dornstein quoted Elie Wiesel: “Sometimes it happens that we travel for a long time without knowing that we have made the long journey solely to pronounce a certain word, a certain phrase, in a certain place. The meeting of the place and the word is a rare accomplishment.” It might seem abstract and philosophical, Dornstein said, but this is the way he came to understand his role as avenger. He surveyed books about Jews tracking down Nazis, and Israelis hunting the terrorists who attacked the 1972 Munich Olympics. <> His reckoning, he told me, would come not in an act of retribution but in the delivery of a message: “Twenty-five years ago, on a day of your choosing, you put a bomb in an airplane, and the course of my life changed. Now, on a day of my choosing, I will come to your home and I will knock on your door and say, ‘I was on the other side of that act.’ ”
"Pop for Misfits" / Kelefa Sanneh
__ which was a complicated sort of compliment. “Oblivion” was a great choice to top the Pitchfork list precisely because it was not an obvious choice.
__ She likes to perform in front of a powerful fan, which blows back her hair to create a small-budget version of a big-budget music video. “I’m shocked that more people don’t use fans,” she says.
"The Art of Witness" / James Wood
- a beautifully unclassifiable book, “The Periodic Table” (1975).
- What sets his writing apart from much Holocaust testimony is his relish for portraiture, the pleasure he takes in the palpability of other people, the human amplitude of his noticing. “The Periodic Table” abounds with funny sketches of Levi’s relatives, who are celebrated and gently mocked in the chapter named “Argon,” because, like the gas, they were generally inert: lazy, immobile characters given to witty conversation and idle speculation. Inert they may have been, but colorless they are not.
- you know that you are in the hands of a true writer, someone equipped with an avaricious and indexical memory, who knows how to animate his details, stage his scenes, and ration his anecdotes.
- Pagis’s poem means: “Job did exist, because Job was in the death camps. Suffering is not the most terrible thing; worse is to have the reality of one’s suffering erased.” In just this way, Levi’s writing insists that Job existed and was not a parable. His clarity is ontological and moral: these things happened, a victim witnessed them, and they must never be erased or forgotten.
- The result is a kind of ethics, when the writer is constantly registering the moral (which is to say, in this case, the immoral) novelty of the details he encounters.
- First, they register their contamination by what befell them (the “adventure,” we think, should not be called that; it must be described as an “ordeal”); and then they dryly repel that contamination (no, we will insist on calling the experience, with full ironic power, an “adventure”).
- In normal existence, Levi argues, there is a “third way” between winning and losing, between altruism and atrocity, between being saved and being drowned, and this third way is in fact the rule. But in the camp there was no third way. It is this apprehension that expands Levi’s understanding for those caught in what he called the gray zone... The gray zone, which might be mistaken for the third way, is an aberration, a state of desperate limitation produced by the absence of a third way.
- Saul Bellow once said that all the great modern novelists were really attempting a definition of human nature, in order to justify the continuation of life and of their craft.
- Goodness, for Levi, was palpable and comprehensible, but evil was palpable and incomprehensible. That was the healthiness within himself.
http://popsonnet.tumblr.com/ :
As the critic William Empson wisely remarked, what Shakespeare continually shows is that life is essentially inadequate to the human spirit. Our truths are too meagre and mammal to rise to our hopes of what life ought to be.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/08/29/pop_sonnets_tumblr_makes_shakespeare_sonnets_out_of_pop_songs_video.html
http://www.metafilter.com/142060/Young-Thomas-Is-A-Longshoreman-By-Trade
http://popsonnet.tumblr.com/post/88602462362/get-lucky
