Fri, 02 May 2008
Sedaris on smoking
Really, David Sedaris is one of the best essayists in English. The incipit:
When I was in fourth grade, my class took a field trip to the American Tobacco plant in nearby Durham, North Carolina. There we witnessed the making of cigarettes and were given free packs to take home to our parents. I tell people this and they ask me how old I am, thinking, I guess, that I went to the world’s first elementary school, one where we wrote on cave walls and hunted our lunch with clubs. Then I mention the smoking lounge at my high school. It was outdoors, but, still, you’d never find anything like that now, not even if the school was in a prison.
Via TSO.
posted by Bill White at 10:18 | permalink | email me | | |
Sat, 19 Apr 2008
Against the dehumanization of art
An old must-read from Mark Helprin in The New Criterion. Here's the central blessed point of his essay:
I have just spoken an immense heresy in this age of relativism: that some things can be better than others, that ways exist to assess value, that in life there is somehow an absolute standard. Though the entire cultural apparatus may deny the existence of an absolute standard, though the universities, the philosophers, the newspapers, and eventually, perhaps, every single human being on earth may deny that it exists ... it does, nonetheless, exist.
And here's a paragraph that stuck with me as I read the latest equipment-laden Field & Stream magazine:
Modernism is by necessity obsessed with form, much like a craftsman obsessed with his tools and materials. In my climbing days we used to call people like that “equipment weenies.” These days you can see it in fly-fishing, where not a few people go out once a year with $5,000-worth of equipment to catch (maybe) $5-worth of fish. What should have been the story of the man, the stream, and the fish becomes instead a romance between the man and his tools. In this century the same thing happened in art. Just as they who would deny the existence of the soul will perforce worship the body, those who do not immediately know the difference between art and design are those who would confuse and equate a sailfish levitated above windblown waves with a reconstruction of its stiff and motionless skeleton in a natural history museum.
This 1865 painting by Winslow Homer, "The Veteran in a New Field", figures in an anecdote in his essay:
posted by Bill White at 20:33 | permalink | email me | | |
Tue, 15 Apr 2008
Up and then down
Here's a marvelous essay on elevators from Nick Paumgarten in the April 21 2008 New Yorker.
posted by Bill White at 20:44 | permalink | email me | | |
