May 2013
4 posts
Imre Kertész explains in his 2002 Nobel lecture how a commonplace moment during the Holocaust became warped in everyone’s memories—and how he managed to un-warp it:
I am speaking of the twenty minutes spent on the arrival platform of the Birkenau extermination camp—the time it took people clambering down from the train to reach the officer doing the selecting. I more or less...
March 2013
8 posts
If you have never driven over country roads it is useless for me to tell you about it; you wouldn’t understand anyway. But if you have, I would rather not remind you of it. …
—Mikhail Bulgakov, A Country Doctor’s Notebook
Edward Jay Epstein describes Vladimir Nabokov’s literature class at Cornell circa 1954. Among other things, he got paid $10 a week to be Nabokov’s “auxiliary course assistant”:
Every Wednesday, the movies changed at the four theaters in downtown Ithaca, called by Nabokov “the near near,” “the near far,” “the far near,” and “the far far.” My task, which used up most of my...
Lawyers, guns, and yakuza
There’s an intriguing theory in Misha Glenny’s McMafia on why the yakuza took on such a prominent role in Japanese life after World War II. It was all thanks to strict licensing quotas for lawyers:
“Traditionally, of course, the yakuza has always been involved in prostitution and gambling. Everyone more or less accepted this state of affairs, and that accounted for the bulk of...
Anne Carson explains how she met her husband:
They don’t even agree on how they met. In Currie’s version, he was working the book table at one of Carson’s readings in Ann Arbor when, during the reception—while everyone else was enjoying the feast (it featured a shrimp volcano)—Carson brought him a plate of food.
“I have no memory of this,” Carson said.
...
February 2013
7 posts
A short history of the asterisk—and why they’re now used to mask computer passwords:
[T]his ubiquitous critical sign, named from the Greek for “small star,” originated in Ptolemaic Alexandria, where the great textual scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium and his student Aristarchus of Samothrace used them to mark repeated lines in the Iliad and Odyssey.
Several centuries...
One of the greatest joys in the world, it seems to me, is to be able to share with someone one’s ideas, one’s feelings, one’s impressions… Hmm! This thought is presented in a work translated from German. The title escapes me.
—Nikolai Gogol, Diary of a Madman
From the annals of post-Soviet customer service:
When McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in the Soviet Union in 1990 near Moscow’s Pushkin Square… it went through an extensive training program for the new workers. Of course, customer service, which was a brand new concept for the Soviets, was extensively emphasized for the new McDonald’s
After several days of...
January 2013
6 posts
Corpse bride
For those curious (I was), here’s a biological blow-by-blow of what exactly happens to the human body after death. Essential commentary interspersed:
First comes the “fresh” stage. Within minutes of death, carbon dioxide starts to accumulate in the blood, making it more acidic. This causes cells to burst open and spill enzymes which start to digest tissues from...
Under the sun the couple presented smiles to the world; under the moon they were lost in thought: and so they had quietly passed the years.
—Natsume Sōseki, The Gate (1910)
“Actually, this reminds me of an essay I read a long time ago about Soviet science fiction. The author — if anyone remembers where this came from — noted that most science fiction is about one of two thoughts: ‘if only,’ or ‘if this goes on.’ Both were subversive, from the Soviet point of view: the first implied that things could be better, the second that there was...
December 2012
18 posts
Compare and contrast. V.S. Naipaul when his first wife was dying:
As his first wife, Patricia Hale, battled breast cancer, Naipaul left her alone for long periods, carrying out serious affairs with other women. … Of her death two years later, he added, “It could be said that I killed her. It could be said. I feel a little bit that way.” The day after the cremation, Naipaul invited [his...
Lincoln, etc.
I’m maybe the last person around to see Lincoln. I thought it was great. A few random thoughts:
1) It’s weird but neat to see a big-budget Hollywood movie actually try to advance a novel thesis about a historical question. As Matt Yglesias notes, scholars seem to disagree on why Lincoln was in such a rush to push the 13th amendment in early 1865 when he could’ve just waited...
Wonderful/horrible New Yorker piece by Rachel Aviv about gay homeless youth in New York City. There are even some panhandling tips:
Samantha and Ryan talked about the “housed world” as if it were an exotic culture, intrinsically superior to their own. They spoke in academic tones, trading theories about the patterns of “housed thinking.” They treated the subway, where...
—Freedy Johnston, “The...
Right on: “Fifteen years after vultures disappeared from Mumbai’s skies, the Parsi community here intends to build two aviaries at one of its most sacred sites so that the giant scavengers can once again devour human corpses.”
Transnistrian soccer mysteries
Here’s an important question I’ll bet everyone’s been wondering about. How exactly does the tiny breakaway republic of Transnistria manage to afford one of the most lavish soccer stadiums in all of Europe? As seen here:
Some context: Transnistria is a weird pseudo-country. It’s technically part of Moldova, but maintains de facto independence with help from Russia’s...
Here is a typical problem: A passenger on the sixth floor wants to descend. The closest car is on the seventh floor, but it already has three riders and has made two stops. Is it the right choice to make that car stop again? That would be the best result for the sixth-floor passenger, but it would make the other people’s rides longer.
For Ms. Christy, these are mathematical problems with...
Questionable advice on how to handle insomnia from Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book:
I imagine a parallel universe, hidden inside the one we inhabit, and I imagine myself wandering intoxicated about its new and sparkling streets, as the objects around me open like flowers to reveal their interior selves. I imagine the amazement of a man who has lost his memory. I imagine I’ve been...
On a long view, understand, it is only recently that we have been guiltlessly obsessed with either pleasure or happiness. In secular traditions, such as the Greek or the Chinese, a pleasuring version of happiness is downplayed, at any rate in high theory, in favor of political or philosophical insight. The ancient Chinese sage Zhuangzi observed of some goldfish in a pond, “See how happy they...
She was almost ready to go, standing before the hall mirror, putting on her hat, while he, his hands behind him, appeared pinned to the door frame, waiting like Saint Sebastian for the arrows to begin piercing him. The hat was new and had cost her seven dollars and a half. She kept saying, “Maybe I shouldn’t have paid that for it. No, I shouldn’t have. I’ll take it off and...
November 2012
6 posts
“Consider the art of Mondrian, whose work consists exclusively of horizontal and vertical lines encasing blocks of colour. (His conviction in this principle was so strong that fellow artist Theo van Doesburg’s decision to use diagonal lines ended their friendship.)”
Now the real winter has set in and the lake is frozen over almost all the way to the breakwater. The ice is rough, in some places it looks as if big waves had been frozen in place.
—Alice Munro, “Tricks” (2004)
The frozen lake not level but mounded along the shore, as if the waves had turned to ice in the act of falling.
—Alice Munro, “Amundsen” (2012)
...
October 2012
10 posts
The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door.
—Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (1992)
