The New Yorker, 2005-07-04

[fiefoe]

"Death of a Fish" / Adam Gopnik  (languagehat is also a fan.)

• For a pet condemned to live in so many brackets of meta-meaning, a fish passing as a hamster hoping to be a dog, Bluie had a pretty good life.
• Luke... still held that the problem of thinking and feeling certainly felt like a problem when you thought about it.
  
• [Daniel Dennett vs. David Chalmers:] Consciousness is not the ghost in the machine; it is the hum of the machinery.
  
• The essential condition of youth is to be mind-visionary: to see everything as though it might have a mind.
  
• Ascribing feelings to things is a way of protecting your own right to have feelings. Expanding the circle of consciousness extends the rule of feelings.
  
• (Hitchcock) didn't think that there was anything bizarre in the idea of someone constantly being remade in the image of someone else's schemes or desires or weird plot points, because he thought that this is what life and love consist of.
  
• What Hitchcock's films of the fifties have in common with all the world's religions is the faith that death can be overcome, or at least made tolerable, by repetitive obsession.
  

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"The Misfit" / Judith Thurman
__ Conventional fashion, and particularly its advertising, is a narrative genre - historical romance at one end of the spectrum and science fiction at the other, with chick lit in between.
__ There was a sense that a once festive, feudal tournament of virtuosity had become a Renaissance fair with demonstrations of spinning and horseshoeing in period costume.
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David Denby: His thin skin is his humanity.
Couple walking on the beach: "I can't wait to see what you're like online."

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