The New Yorker, 2005-05-02

[fiefoe]

"INK: The Writing Wife" / Lauren Collins
the glut of novels "about Southern belles and their cancer scares"
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"Roman Renovation" / John Seabrook

__ The piazza lost its status as prophecy and became, instead, a monumentally failed boast.
__ a TV show that was a cross between Charlie Rose and Jerry Springer
__ Every city has its battles between preservationists and developers, but in Rome the situation is greatly complicated by the fact that there are so many different Romes to preserve -- classical Rome, medieval Rome, Renaissance Rome, Baroque Rome, eighteenth-century Rome, post-unification-of-Italy Rome, and Fascist Rome.
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"Rules of Engagement" / Judith Thurman

• "Success has always been the greatest liar," Nietzsche wrote. "'Great men' as they are venerated are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction."
• Adolescence is an age of compulsive posing that coincides with a quest for authenticity, and Malraux never outgrew either. Jean Grosjean... wrote that his "strength and weakness [was] to have triumphed over childhood without succumbing to the slightest maturity."
• [Todd] is keen on Malraux’s secrets and incurious about his mystery.
• Malraux was the hero of a tragicomic battle that nearly all of us know and most of us lose: "man's struggle," as he calls it, "against humiliation."
• innocent of discretion
  

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