Here.
And now, a collection of quotes, collected without comment, from the magazines of the last couple of weeks.
(1) From Michael Kazin's "Paranoia Strikes Deep" from The Nation (September 14, 2009), here:
Ironically, the very ineptitude of conservative governance in the recent past makes Americans more open to the right's arguments now that it is out of national power. Why trust the federal state to do anything it promises? The last "big government" program that aided a large number of Americans was Medicare, enacted almost forty-five years ago--so long that some deluded recipients don't recognize it as a public program at all.
Intruiged? Go, read.
(2) From Jon lee Anderson's "Gangland : Who controls the streets of Rio de Janeiro" from The New Yorker (October 5, 2009), here:
Every year, the gangsters got younger; now some were as young as ten. It was "like a Middle Ages phenomenon, feudalism and warlordism without any purpose other than living day to day," Sirkis said. "It's a low-intensity, nonideological insurgency."
Intruiged? Go, read (sub. req. ; go to Mudd).
(3) From Jeffery Toobin's "Bench Press : Are Obama's judges really liberals?" from The New Yorker (September 21, 2009), here:
Obama himself speaks as if pragmatism were a substitute for ideology, or at least an improvement on it.
Intruiged, go read.
(4) From Avi Davis's "The Undead Travel : How tourism's insatiable hunger for exotic destinations keeps Romania's fictional heritage alive"--on the legend and lure of Count Dracula--in The Believer (October 2009), here:
Now it seems to me that the Romanian guides are seducing the tourists just as much as the tourists seduce them. Both draw on the same body of famous dates and famous names, of unnaturally preserved attractions, of misconceptions, and manufactured myths. It may be that, after the pallor of cultural immortality falls on their town, the locals--the ones who are not tour guides or souvenir sellers or hotel owners--get to keep something even more real for themselves, something a tourist can never touch. Because if the tourist, like the vampire, stands outside history, then he also has no access to history. And that is what saves the locals: the knowledge that they can feed the tourist this false, undead body of attractions, monuments, and sites, and keep the living glow of history for themselves.
Intrigued? Go, read
(5) From August Kleinzahler's "My Alaska : Musings about the bygone era when one could still meet a schizophrenic cat named baby teapot"--on America's last frontier: Alaska--in The Believer (October 2009), here:
Hundreds of young men just like us flooded into Juneau every spring, hoping to get construction work at what were then the inflated wages available in Alaska, around twelve or fourteen dollars an hour for unskilled labor--at least that was the number being floated around. Over time I'd realize a lot of information was "floated around" in that part of the world. Alaska, not least Juneau, is a place where the fabulist is not reviled but revered. The two big lies I remember best from that time were (1) the weather's going to break any day now; and (2) there'll be so much work in about two weeks' time that they'll be dragging worthless bastards like you off the street.
Intruged? Go, read.
(6) From Adam Gopnik's review--which is at once, mean, funny, and true--of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol; it's titled: "Read All About It" in The New Yorker (September 28, 2009), here:
The trouble comes not only when you recall real history but wen you look around: the conspiracy theories out there today--the ones about the socialist fascists who are coming to get you at the behest o the alien President--are not cute. The old ones weren't, either. Real anti-Masonic paranoia was a bad business, intertwined with the ugliest politics in European history. Fear and hatred underlie conspiracy theories; they always have. You can draw them away from reality, but you can't really drain them of rage. There's maybe something worrying about so many millions of readers entertaining a paranoia on the page that was, in its time, as crazy as the paranoia in the country today. As that twelve-year-old's mom used to say, it's all a lot of fun until somebody cries.
Intruiged? Go, read.
(7) From David Remnick's "Blago Speaks. Again."--on Rod Blagojevich's new political memoir--in The New Yorker (September 28, 2009), here:
[Blagojevich], like Icarus, "flew too effing close to the sun." And yet no sun can melt Blago's coif.
Intrigued? Go, read?
(8) From Susan Orlean's "The It Bird : The return of the back-yard chicken." in The New Yorker (September 28, 2009), here:
[R]ight now, across the country and beyond, there is a surging passion for raising the birds, Chickens seem to be a perfect convergence of the economic, environmental, gastronomic, and emotional matters of the moment[.]
Intrigued (and you should be)? Go, read (sub. req. ; just go to Mudd).
|