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fiefoe"Beautiful Monsters" / Ariel Levy
__ “Niki told me, when we were both still in our seemingly lionhearted promiscuous period, ‘If there’s anybody you don’t want me to have an affair with, let me know.’ ” Mathews smiled ruefully.
__ she serves lunch to workers in undershirts, who sit at her dining table inside the Sphinx, under a chandelier made of a cow’s skull. .. She wrote to Harry Mathews, who remained a lifelong friend, “This familiar gesture to all these handsome, very young Italian machos—who before were really just country boys, farmers . . . helped me to assume a psychological power. It was easy for them to take orders from La Mama, they do their whole life, as long as I respected the very thin façade of their maleness.”
__ she told me. “It was a question of survival: she couldn’t put me in the picture.” She thought for a moment and then smiled a little. “Really—and it’s something I wish my brother would get—we were loved. The thing is, with love, it’s one thing to love and then it’s another to know how to love, and maybe we take a lifetime to learn.”
"Thrones of Blood" / Clive James
__ Quietly boasting about his treasury of secrets, he says, “Knowledge is power.” Cersei orders her guards to seize him and cut his throat. They are all set to do so when she orders them to release him. Then she tells him, “Power is power.” There are only a few scraps of dialogue in the forty seconds of the sequence, but it speaks volumes. This couldn’t be done on the page with the same force, because you need the closeups, especially of the fractured light in Baelish’s eyes when he realizes that his own cleverness might have condemned him to death. The moment is a lesson in writing for the screen... The show’s long-range carbon arc burns between the extreme simplicity of primitive emotions and the extreme technical sophistication with which they are expressed.
__ Peter Dinklage as Tyrion, from his first episodes in the show, had such an impact that he suddenly made all the other male actors in the world look too tall. It was a deserved success: his face is a remarkable instrument of expression over which he has complete professional control, and his voice is a thing of rare beauty, as rich as Chaliapin singing Boris Godunov.
"Lost Illusions" / Caleb Crain
__ The result, Hochschild writes, was simultaneously “both a right-wing military coup and a left-wing social revolution.” In territory conquered by the generals, Nationalists restored the traditional, virtually feudal authority of the Church and the landowners, banned the regional languages of the Basques and the Catalans, and inveighed against Jews, Freemasons, and Reds. In Republican territory, workers took over factories, churches became refugee centers, and fighting bulls were slaughtered to give peasants their first taste of beef.
__ Militias of barbers and of graphic artists sprang up, reinforced by the first influx of Soviet munitions and international volunteers.
__ Fighting at close quarters in university buildings, French volunteers fired from behind volumes of Kant and Voltaire, while British ones, behind a barricade of Encyclopædia Britannicas, determined that it took three hundred and fifty pages to stop a bullet. The city (Madrid) did not fall until the very end of the war. For two and a half years, it managed to continue life under siege.
"In Living Color" / Emily Nussbaum
__ After working on “Soul Food,” he helped broker a reality-TV deal for his best friend since childhood, the model Tyra Banks. The show, “America’s Next Top Model,” became a hit,
__ the Evans family flips between two equally extreme reactions to racism and poverty. One minute, they’re fatalistic to the point of self-sabotage; the next, they’re spouting affirmations of empty hope—“Tomorrow’s gonna be a better day!” They might in fact be “rich in love.” But their lives are all decisions, no choices.
"Stranger in Our Midst" / James Wood
__ In late work by Muriel Spark, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, William Golding, and now Edna O’Brien, you can detect a certain impatience with formal or generic proprieties; a wild, dark humor; a fearlessness in assertion and argument; a tonic haste in storytelling, so that the usual ground-clearing and pacing and evidentiary process gets accelerated or discarded altogether, as if it were (as it so often can be) mere narrative palaver that is stopping us from talking about what really matters. In much of that late work, there is a slightly thinned atmosphere, the prose a little less rich and hospitable than previously, the characters less full or persuasive, a general sense of dimmed surplus
O’Brien is eighty-five years old, and praising this novel for its ambition, its daring vitality, its curiosity about the present age and about the lives of those displaced by its turbulence shouldn’t be mistaken for the backhanded compliment that all this is remarkable given the author’s advanced age. It’s simply a remarkable novel.
“Same but Different” / Siddhartha Mukherjee
__ “Niki told me, when we were both still in our seemingly lionhearted promiscuous period, ‘If there’s anybody you don’t want me to have an affair with, let me know.’ ” Mathews smiled ruefully.
__ she serves lunch to workers in undershirts, who sit at her dining table inside the Sphinx, under a chandelier made of a cow’s skull. .. She wrote to Harry Mathews, who remained a lifelong friend, “This familiar gesture to all these handsome, very young Italian machos—who before were really just country boys, farmers . . . helped me to assume a psychological power. It was easy for them to take orders from La Mama, they do their whole life, as long as I respected the very thin façade of their maleness.”
__ she told me. “It was a question of survival: she couldn’t put me in the picture.” She thought for a moment and then smiled a little. “Really—and it’s something I wish my brother would get—we were loved. The thing is, with love, it’s one thing to love and then it’s another to know how to love, and maybe we take a lifetime to learn.”
"Thrones of Blood" / Clive James
__ Quietly boasting about his treasury of secrets, he says, “Knowledge is power.” Cersei orders her guards to seize him and cut his throat. They are all set to do so when she orders them to release him. Then she tells him, “Power is power.” There are only a few scraps of dialogue in the forty seconds of the sequence, but it speaks volumes. This couldn’t be done on the page with the same force, because you need the closeups, especially of the fractured light in Baelish’s eyes when he realizes that his own cleverness might have condemned him to death. The moment is a lesson in writing for the screen... The show’s long-range carbon arc burns between the extreme simplicity of primitive emotions and the extreme technical sophistication with which they are expressed.
__ Peter Dinklage as Tyrion, from his first episodes in the show, had such an impact that he suddenly made all the other male actors in the world look too tall. It was a deserved success: his face is a remarkable instrument of expression over which he has complete professional control, and his voice is a thing of rare beauty, as rich as Chaliapin singing Boris Godunov.
"Lost Illusions" / Caleb Crain
__ The result, Hochschild writes, was simultaneously “both a right-wing military coup and a left-wing social revolution.” In territory conquered by the generals, Nationalists restored the traditional, virtually feudal authority of the Church and the landowners, banned the regional languages of the Basques and the Catalans, and inveighed against Jews, Freemasons, and Reds. In Republican territory, workers took over factories, churches became refugee centers, and fighting bulls were slaughtered to give peasants their first taste of beef.
__ Militias of barbers and of graphic artists sprang up, reinforced by the first influx of Soviet munitions and international volunteers.
__ Fighting at close quarters in university buildings, French volunteers fired from behind volumes of Kant and Voltaire, while British ones, behind a barricade of Encyclopædia Britannicas, determined that it took three hundred and fifty pages to stop a bullet. The city (Madrid) did not fall until the very end of the war. For two and a half years, it managed to continue life under siege.
__________________________________________
"In Living Color" / Emily Nussbaum
__ After working on “Soul Food,” he helped broker a reality-TV deal for his best friend since childhood, the model Tyra Banks. The show, “America’s Next Top Model,” became a hit,
__ the Evans family flips between two equally extreme reactions to racism and poverty. One minute, they’re fatalistic to the point of self-sabotage; the next, they’re spouting affirmations of empty hope—“Tomorrow’s gonna be a better day!” They might in fact be “rich in love.” But their lives are all decisions, no choices.
"Stranger in Our Midst" / James Wood
__ In late work by Muriel Spark, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, William Golding, and now Edna O’Brien, you can detect a certain impatience with formal or generic proprieties; a wild, dark humor; a fearlessness in assertion and argument; a tonic haste in storytelling, so that the usual ground-clearing and pacing and evidentiary process gets accelerated or discarded altogether, as if it were (as it so often can be) mere narrative palaver that is stopping us from talking about what really matters. In much of that late work, there is a slightly thinned atmosphere, the prose a little less rich and hospitable than previously, the characters less full or persuasive, a general sense of dimmed surplus
O’Brien is eighty-five years old, and praising this novel for its ambition, its daring vitality, its curiosity about the present age and about the lives of those displaced by its turbulence shouldn’t be mistaken for the backhanded compliment that all this is remarkable given the author’s advanced age. It’s simply a remarkable novel.
__________________________________________
“Same but Different” / Siddhartha Mukherjee
- Allis soon found his ideal subject: a bizarre single-celled microbe called Tetrahymena. Blob-shaped cells surrounded by dozens of tiny, whiskery projections called cilia, Tetrahymena are improbable-looking—each a hairy Barbapapa, or a Mr. Potato Head who fell into a vat of Rogaine. “Perhaps the strangest thing about this strange organism is that it carries two very distinct collections of genes,” he told me. “One is completely shut off during its normal life cycle and another is completely turned on. It’s really black-and-white.” Then, during reproduction, an entirely different nucleus wakes up and goes into action.
- These protein systems, overlaying information on the genome, interacted with one another, reinforcing or attenuating their signals. Together, they generated the bewildering intricacy necessary for a cell to build a constellation of other cells out of the same genes, and for the cells to add “memories” to their genomes and transmit these memories to their progeny.
- Genes, after all, are the permanent repository of a cell’s information system, and thus more tamperproof. (If genes are hardware, epigenes are firmware.) But by altering epigenes—the manner in which DNA is coiled or uncoiled, methylated or demethylated—one should be able to alter which genes are activated.
- She shared my mother’s lightness about fate—an equanimity that borders nobility but comes with no pride.
- But twins often experience parts of their lives as tragedies of nature. My mother and her sister grew up in a walled garden, imagining each other not as friends or siblings but as alternate selves. They were separated not at birth but at marriage, as sisters often are.
- Jeta Tulur, sheta Bulur, my grandfather would say: “What is Tulu’s is also Bulu’s.” But that wistful phrase, a parent’s fantasy of perfect parity for his children, was absurd; how could it possibly last? The grief that twins experience as they drift apart in life is unique, but it abuts a general grief: if eternal sameness will not guarantee eternal closeness, then what hope is there for siblings, or parents, or lovers?
- It is a testament to the unsettling beauty of the genome that it can make the real world stick. Hindu philosophers have long described the experience of “being” as a web—jaal. Genes form the threads of the web; the detritus that adheres to it transforms every web into a singular being. An organism’s individuality, then, is suspended between genome and epigenome. We call the miracle of this suspension “fate.” We call our responses to it “choice.” We call one such unique variant of one such organism a “self.”
