Friday, July 29, 2011
"I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them."
"Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night."
Books
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Bon Iver, Michicant (We saw this live...I die.)
I was unafraid, I was a boy, I was a tender age
melic in the naked, knew a lake and drew the lofts for page
hurdle all the waitings up, know it wasn't wedded love
4 long minutes end and it was over it'd all be back
and the frost took up the eyes
pressed against the pane could see the veins and there was poison out
resting in a raze the inner claims I hadn't breadth to shake
searching for an inner clout, may not take another bout
honey in the hale could fill the pales of loving less with vain
hon, it wasn't yet the spring
aiming and it sunk and we were drunk and we had fleshed it out
nose up in the globes, you never know if you are passing out
no it wasn't maiden-up, the falling or the faded luck
hung up in the ivory, both were climbing for a finer cause
love can hardly leave the room
with your heart
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Saturday, July 23, 2011
A book critic at the ballet
By DWIGHT GARNER
A few years ago, The Guardian had the witty idea to ask its sports writers and cultural critics to swap jobs for a day. The results were delightful. An observation from the newspaper’s rugby columnist, Thomas Castalgnede, sent to review a production of “Tosca” at the Royal Opera House, has stuck with me. “What I saw in ‘Tosca’ was exactly what drew me to sport,” he wrote. “I just love to watch people give it everything — in any walk of life.”
I’m a book critic, and not a complete idiot about dance. (I saw a Christopher Wheeldon ballet at the David H. Koch a few months ago that made me, and my 12-year-old daughter, weep with pleasure.) But about classical dance I am comprehensively uneducated. Asked by The Times to attend one of the first United States performances of Alexei Ratmansky’s “Anna Karenina,” by Russia’s Mariinsky Ballet — formerly known as the Kirov Ballet — I agreed, with nagging reservations. Brilliant works of interior art like Tolstoy’s novel tend to suffer terribly in the hands of those who would interpret them in other mediums. My colleague Alastair Macaulay’s mighty — and mightily entertaining — put-down of this production in Wednesday’s Times did not make me more eager to go.
The Mariinsky’s production does, however, throw some complicating light on Tolstoy’s novel, and makes you turn it over freshly in your mind. The ballet, in its first half, gives off the air of a costume drama, of second-rate “Masterpiece Theater.” It’s stiff and proper and wan, filled with the pomp and broad gestures of early silent films. Tolstoy’s language can have a similarly chafing effect on readers coming to it for the first time; it takes time to synch with his rhythms.
The first line of Tolstoy’s novel — it has become such a cliché (if not an outright emetic) that, when I was an editor at the Times Book Review,
references to it in that publication were essentially banned – of course declares: “All happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy
after its own fashion.” All the memorable moments in the Mariinsky’s “Anna Karenina” dilate upon desolation and conjure a brewing sense of doom, a feeling underscored by the frequently beautiful set design (think snow, think lonely trains, think Edward Hopper by way of St. Petersburg).
The ballet, for me, unfurled like a black rose in its second half. As Dan Savage would put it: It gets better. Two dances in particular — an icy one between Anna and her increasingly estranged husband, and one featuring the now-socially scorned Anna, the moral adultress, alone in a red dress — drilled me to my chair. Ulyana Lopatkina, who danced the role of Anna in the performance I saw, gave a sense of what Tolstoy called the character’s “wonderful depth of feeling.”
Vladimir Nabokov was right when he called Tolstoy’s prose “so tiger bright, so original and universal that it easily transcends the sermon.” The
Mariinsky Ballet’s “Anna Karenina” is definitely not, as Mr. Macaulay pointed out, something you would call tiger bright. But those trains,
that snow, the flash of both Anna’s eyes and her red dress, these things I put in my readerly pocket like small valuable coins.
Newest Kristof
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/opinion/24kristof.html?ref=opinion
Well, wake up to the national security threat. Only it’s not coming from abroad, but from our own domestic extremists.
Republicans, Zealots and Our Security
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
IF China or Iran threatened our national credit rating and tried to drive up our interest rates, or if they sought to damage our education system, we would erupt in outrage.
We tend to think of national security narrowly as the risk of a military or terrorist attack. But national security is about protecting our people and our national strength — and the blunt truth is that the biggest threat to America’s national security this summer doesn’t come from China, Iran or any other foreign power. It comes from budget machinations, and budget maniacs, at home.
House Republicans start from a legitimate concern about rising long-term debt. Politicians are usually focused only on short-term issues, so it would be commendable to see the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party seriously focused on containing long-term debt. But on this issue, many House Republicans aren’t serious, they’re just obsessive in a destructive way. The upshot is that in their effort to protect the American economy from debt, some of them are willing to drag it over the cliff of default.
It is not exactly true that this would be our first default. We defaulted in 1790. By some definitions, we defaulted on certain gold obligations in 1933. And in 1979, the United States had trouble managing payouts to some individual investors on time (partly because of a failure of word processing equipment) and thus was in technical default.
Yet even that brief lapse in 1979 raised interest payments in the United States. Terry L. Zivney, a finance professor at Ball State University and co-author of a scholarly paper about the episode, says the 1979 default increased American government borrowing costs by 0.6 of a percentage point indefinitely.
Any deliberate and sustained interruption this year could have a greater impact. We would see higher interest rates on mortgages, car loans, business loans and credit cards.
American government borrowing would also become more expensive. In February, the Congressional Budget Office noted that a 1 percentage point rise in interest rates could add more than $1 trillion to borrowing costs over a decade.
In other words, Republican zeal to lower debts could result in increased interest expenses and higher debts. Their mania to save taxpayers could cost taxpayers. That suggests not governance so much as fanaticism.
More broadly, a default would leave America a global laughingstock. Our “soft power,” our promotion of democracy around the world, and our influence would all take a hit. The spectacle of paralysis in the world’s largest economy is already bewildering to many countries. If there is awe for our military prowess and delight in our movies and music, there is scorn for our political/economic management.
While one danger to national security comes from the risk of default, another comes from overzealous budget cuts — especially in education, at the local, state and national levels. When we cut to the education bone, we’re not preserving our future but undermining it.
It should be a national disgrace that the United States government has eliminated spending for major literacy programs in the last few months, with scarcely a murmur of dissent.
Consider Reading Is Fundamental, a 45-year-old nonprofit program that has cost the federal government only $25 million annually. It’s a public-private partnership with 400,000 volunteers, and it puts books in the hands of low-income children. The program helped four million American children improve their reading skills last year. Now it has lost all federal support.
“They have made a real difference for millions of kids,” Kyle Zimmer, founder of First Book, another literacy program that I’ve admired, said of Reading Is Fundamental. “It is a tremendous loss that their federal support has been cut. We are going to pay for these cuts in education for generations.”
Education programs like these aren’t quick fixes, and the relation between spending and outcomes is uncertain and complex. Nurturing reading skills is a slog rather than a sprint — but without universal literacy we have no hope of spreading opportunity, fighting crime or chipping away at poverty.
“The attack on literacy programs reflects a broader assault on education programs,” said Rosa DeLauro, a Democratic member of Congress from Connecticut. She notes that Republicans want to cut everything from early childhood programs to Pell grants for college students. Republican proposals have singled out some 43 education programs for elimination, but it’s not seen as equally essential to end tax loopholes on hedge fund managers.
So let’s remember not only the national security risks posed by Iran and Al Qaeda. Let’s also focus on the risks, however unintentional, from domestic zealots.
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