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"The picture in my stolen [passport] wasn’t half bad, but in the new one I look like a penis with an old person’s face drawn on it… This was the new me, post-theft— all my youthful optimism gone, filched by some drug addict in Hawaii."
— In this week’s issue, David Sedaris reflects on the time his passport was stolen while on vacation, and the bureaucratic troubles that ensued (subscription required): http://nyr.kr/ZfFFmb(Source: newyorker.com)
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"A common complaint then among Time writers who found themselves stuck on a story was “this story just won’t write”—as if the story had a will of its own and was using it to resist being shaped into a coherent narrative. I may have used the phrase from time to time myself. The problem was mostly space. There on my desk was the raw material for one of the three or four stories in my section: a fifteen-page file from the main reporter on the story, a five-page file from the Washington bureau on the federal angle, three books that the researcher thought I might find useful, a fistful of previous Time files, and, of course, some clippings from the Times. From this, I was to produce a seventy-line piece that had the arc of a story rather than the “inverted pyramid” structure that was then the template for newspaper articles. (Since the news sometimes failed to conform to Time’s printing schedule, the paragraph containing the denouement of the story often began “At week’s end.”) Given the density of the seventy lines and the imperative to keep the story moving, there often seemed to be at least one highly relevant fact that simply didn’t fit. I pictured that left-out fact darting around to find an opening and being rebuffed by every paragraph it tried to squeeze into—like someone trying door after door in a desperate effort to board a thoroughly stuffed rush-hour subway. Sometimes, if I had until the next day to turn the story in, I’d head home, finding that the knot in the narrative came loose with the rhythmic clacking of the subway train."
— Calvin Trillin reflects on his experience working as a floater at TIME magazine in the early 1960s: http://nyr.kr/WIA50k -
Farewell, Dear Reader
Google Reader, I discovered, is like an infinite attic. Inside it, your old interests, which you’ve outgrown or set aside, keep on growing. It’s as though your old passions wandered off and lived their own lives, without you…
Upon the news that Google Reader would be shutting down, Joshua Rothman logged back in and rediscovered his old self: http://nyr.kr/Z3M1oA
(Source: newyorker.com)
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"We looked at each other with a mix of tenderness and befuddlement, moist-eyed. It was clear to both of us, after the five or ten minutes of our hasty conversation, that this chance meeting was the last time we ever were going to see each other… But that was O.K. Knowing we would never see each other again—it was O.K. When you’re young, you think there’ll be plenty of time for everything in your life: counting all the grains of sand in the Sahara Desert, seeing all the people in the world, becoming greater than Jesus and Lenin and Lomonosov and Pushkin and Einstein all rolled into one, reuniting at some point with everyone you’ve met once in your life, befriending every man, falling in love with every woman… Life is a process of gradually coming to terms with the meaning and the very concept of never-ness. Never—well, so be it. Quoth the raven: oh well, them’s the breaks. Get used to it. Get over it. Life is a perishable proposition of rapidly diminishing returns. You could’ve become this or that; you could’ve been here and there and everywhere; but that didn’t happen—and well, so be it. There won’t be, in the end of your life, a joyous, transcendentally meaningful regathering of everyone you’ve ever met on your path, with stories shared and wine flowing and laughter lilting and happiness abounding and life never-ending—well, so be it."
— Mikhail Iossel reflects on his experience meeting an old friend far away from home: http://nyr.kr/Yb0OyF(Source: newyorker.com)
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“Depressing” was the word used by everyone I spoke to about the film, but depressing has never been a descriptor that puts me off; it’s rare that a movie, even an aggressively tragic one, depresses me. More often, I find myself simply fascinated, and even delighted, by the range of emotions cinema can capture.
But “Amour” depressed me…
Hannah Goldfield on her grandparents, and why she almost didn’t make it through Michael Haneke’s “Amour”: http://nyr.kr/VLcMkR
Photograph: Sony Pictures Classics.
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"All I could think of was how the bullets are so often flying not by purposeful direction but by chance. Chance that someone is sitting in a pew, or desk, or on a stage, or in a patrol car. Chance so powerful when mixed with gunpowder…"
