From John Seabrook’s “The Song Machine”, an excellent dissection of contemporary pop’s songwriting process in the 26 March 2012 New Yorker: Top Forty radio was invented by Todd Storz and Bill Stewart, the operator and program director, respectively, of KOWH, an AM station in Omaha, Nebraska, in the early fifties. Like most music programmers of [...]
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From Peter Schjeldahl’s* review of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings currently on exhibit at Gagosian galleries around the world, in the 23 January New Yorker: Duchamp remarked that art is created partly by its maker and partly by its audience. Hirst dumps pretty much the entire transaction into the audience’s lap. The result is art in [...]
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From Alan Hollinghurst’s new one, The Stranger’s Child: She could really play, couldn’t she?—that was Paul [Bryant (!!!)]‘s first feeling. He looked around hastily at the others, with a bashful grin on his face. Was it Chopin? He saw them all deciding, staring at each other, frowning or nodding, some leaning to whisper. There was [...]
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From Elif Batuman’s piece in the 19/26 Dec 2011 New Yorker on Göbekli Tepe, the oldest man-made thing in the world: After my last afternoon at Göbekli Tepe, I decided to devote the rest of the day to the other Urfa pilgrimage—the Abraham one [Urfa claims to house a cave where Abraham was born]. I [...]
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From Adam Kirsch’s review of recent books on H.G. Wells in the 17 October 2011 New Yorker: Wells, who was in the audience at [Henry] James’s fiasco [with Guy Domville] and learned from the experience, had his own, considerably more chipper approach to the literary life. “It scarcely needs criticism to bring home to me [...]
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From Peter Hessler’s bit on a small-town druggist in the 26 September 2011 New Yorker: In his will, [former customer] Mr. Brick left more than half a million dollars in cash and stock to the local druggist[, Don]. After taxes and other expenses, it came to more than three hundred thousand dollars, which was almost [...]
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Two of them, this time. Pretend there’s no paragraph break. From Adam Gopnik’s review of declinist literature in the 12 September 2011 New Yorker: Despite their title [of That Used to Be Us], the authors [Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum] seem, for instance, determined to avoid the obvious point that one American who shares their [...]
“‘Getting kind of’?” (This is you talking back at me.) “Try ‘always has been’.” I know, right? It’s like an advertisement for my own dull self-importance. I should spend more time dishing, or endorsing products and various artworks. But I consume artworks years after the Internet does, because I am cheap. Did you see Source [...]
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From Mike Hale’s review of “Friends with Benefits”—not the movie everyone’s heard of, but the Friday-evening NBC sitcom that just premiered and has a shelf life of most leafy greens (my emphasis): Focusing on a five-member ensemble — three bumbling, grating men and the two attractive, relentlessly energetic, sexually pliable women, who mysteriously choose to [...]
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A quick one, from George Saunders’s “Home”, printed in this year’s New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue: That part of town was full of castles. Inside one a couple was embracing. Inside another a woman had nine million little Christmas houses out on a table, like she was taking inventory. Across the river the castles got [...]
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From David Thomson’s “When Is a Movie Great?” from the July Harper’s: I love Citizen Kane. I have nothing against it winning [British film magazine Sight & Sound's annual best-movie-ever poll] forever, if we must have a best film of all time. (And we don’t; few of us would seriously heed the call for the [...]
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Just received over email Booklist’s advance review of The Authentic Animal: The Authentic Animal: Inside the Odd and Obsessive World of Taxidermy. Madden, Dave (Author) Aug 2011. 288 p. St. Martin’s, hardcover, $26.99. (9780312643713). 579.4. When you think about taxidermy, you probably think of it as a creepy hobby of a bygone era (fancied by [...]
From the introduction to John Limon’s Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America, a book I’ve got electronic access to through UA’s web site, but which seems so strong by like page three I’m going to have to just buy a copy and tear it up, highlighteringly: The one-sentence version of the theory of [...]
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From Kalefa Sanneh’s review of recent reality-TV criticism in the 9 May 2011 New Yorker: Makeover shows inevitably build to a spectacular moment when “reveal” becomes a noun, and yet the final product is often unremarkable: a woman with an up-to-date generic haircut, wearing a jacket that fits well; a man who is chubby but [...]
Another one from The New Yorker. Do I read anything else? I mean what a bore. Actually, I do. I’m reading Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land which is cap-I Important and full of very good paragraphs. I’ll post one when I’m done. Here’s something from Evan Osnos’s “The Grand Tour”, about the recent rise [...]
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Well, I was going to post one from Ramona Ausubel’s “Atria” from the 4 April 2011 New Yorker, but every paragraph was very good. Every single one. Damn, it’s such a good story. So instead, we have to go with this paragraph in the Adam Gopnik essay, “Get Smart”, on recent books looking at computers [...]
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