January 2012
61 posts
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“Do you know what has hung upon me so heavily of late? In what you said about...”
– Boris Pasternak to Marina Tsvetaeva, 10 June 1926, in Letters, Summer 1926 [via proustitute]
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John Cage - Child of Tree →
Being on a tour in Arizona with the Cunningham Dance Company in 1975, one of dancers (Charles Moulton) brought a dried cactus to Cage, placed it near his ear and plucked the spines of it. This inspired Cage to use cacti as musical instruments in pieces like Child of Tree and Branches. The score consists solely of performance instructions on how to select 10 instruments, using I-Ching chance...
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“Tra vellichii sfrigolii tintinni di colori,
tra il remoto l’oggi il...”
– Andrea Zanzotto, “Versi in onore di Federico”, ne Il cinema brucia e illumina
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“Il più ricco individuo di un villaggio, scriveva il podestà dell’Isola di...”
– Pierre Gaxotte, La rivoluzione francese [via Nicola Porro]
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Why's this so good? →
For the past couple of months Nieman Storyboard has been asking experts to describe what makes their all-time favourite articles and essays so good. To read the 27 excellent short essays click here. Here are links to all the must reads:
Hogs Wild by Ian Frazier Shipping Out by David Foster Wallace Inhaling the Spore by Lawrence Weschler Resurrecti ng The Champ by J.R. Moehringer Up and Then...
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“Allora volevamo fare un romanzo incentrato su quella casetta storta a Bomarzo,...”
– Carlo Fruttero
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“When Dostoevsky met Dickens in 1862 — a meeting that is hard to imagine —...”
– Verlyn Klinkenborg, “The Whirling Sound of Planet Dickens” [via fwriction]
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“Io, giuro, l’unica cosa che ho capito è che Schettino è politico e De Falco...”
– Mattia Feltri
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Between the Lines - Los Angeles Magazine →
In the United States hundreds of engineers make careers out of studying traffic. Entire freeway systems like L.A.’s have been hardwired with sensors connecting to computer banks that aggregate vehicle flow, monitor bottlenecks, explain congestion in complicated algorithms. Yet cars spend just 5 percent of their lives in motion, and until recently there was only one individual in the country...
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“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m...”
– John Cage
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“Primo — se sei innamorato — è una bella cosa — praticamente la cosa migliore che...”
– John Steinbeck scrive al figlio Thom, 10 novembre 1958 [via Freddy Nietzsche]
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“SFIGA. Dalle misere macerie lessicali del ’68 emerge, unico fiore superstite,...”
– Carlo Fruttero, “Sfiga”, in Dizionario affettivo della lingua italiana [via Paolo Nori]
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“A mutual Tory friend offered to introduce us. I agreed with some alacrity. The...”
– Christopher Hitchens on meeting Margaret Thatcher [via Alessandro Lanni]
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L’abbazia delle libertà - Monachesimo 2.0 →
Alla fine delle sue avventure, Gargantua vuole gratificare il monaco che lo ha accompagnato nelle sue imprese facendogli dono di un’abbazia e del relativo abbaziato. Il monaco però rifiuta: «Come potrei governare gli altri, io, che non saprei governare me stesso? Se vi sembra che io vi abbia reso o vi possa rendere in avvenire qualche buon servigio, concedetemi di fondare un’abbazia come piace a...
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“Come ragazzo mi è sempre piaciuto piangere. Sia al tramonto sia quando vado a...”
– Innamorato Fisso del 12 gennaio 2012
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Extremism in the Defense of Liberty Is No Vice →
Barry Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco, California
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What is the ultimate left-wing novel? →
I would say that the story per se is usually left-wing, in both good and bad ways. It elevates the seen over the unseen, can easily portray a struggle for justice, focuses on the anecdote, and encourages us to judge social institutions by the intentions of the people who work in them, rather than looking at their deeper and longer-term outcomes. Precisely because the story is itself so left-wing,...
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“La Romania starebbe pensando a Carlo d’Inghilterra come suo re e...”
– L’Espresso [via Dago]
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“Most editors are failed writers - but so are most writers.”
– T.S. Eliot [via echo4charlie]
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Tyler Brûlé - Mr. Zeitgeist - NYTimes.com →
For the last 15 years, Mr. Brûlé, an Estonian-Canadian who keeps his perma-stubble artfully cropped like Tom Ford’s, has gone outside the publishing establishment and started two culture magazines regarded as bibles in certain design-savvy circles: Wallpaper and Monocle. And he did so while upending notions of what a media company does.
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“He was given to fits of rage, Jewish, liberal paranoia, male chauvinism,...”
– Manhattan
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P. D. Q. Bach - Wikipedia →
P. D. Q. Bach is a fictitious composer invented by musical satirist “Professor” Peter Schickele. In a gag that Schickele has developed over a five-decade-long career, he performs “discovered” works of this forgotten member of the Bach family. Schickele’s music combines parodies of musicological scholarship, the conventions of Baroque and classical music, and slapstick...
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“Emil Krebs, an early-20th-century German diplomat who was also credited with...”
– The Economist, The gift of tongues
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Shostakovich's muse →
The conservatory’s huge Bolshoi Auditorium, sparkling with thousands of lights and overflowing with colorful bouquets, was packed with an audience that had come to celebrate the composer’s return to his hometown, with his new symphony, his 10th. The enormous, excited crowd applauded the Leningrad Philharmonic, under the baton of one of the period’s great conductors, Evgeny...