Last week's New Yorker had a brief & strange article about Prince in Talk of the Town. My favorite part was this bit about his Jehovah's Witness faith:
He attends meetings at a local Kingdom Hall, and, like his fellow-witnesses, he leaves his gated community from time to time to knock on doors and proselytize. "Sometimes people act surprised, but mostly they're really cool about it," he said.
I loved this quote from the recent New Yorker article about Marlon Brando (sadly, not online), about Brando's attempts to reconnect with himself/his family in the 80s (emphasis mine):
At home in Beverly Hills, he saw a psychiatrist several times a week, slowly learning to "be the child I never had a chance to be." At the same time, divorced again and the father of nine (by his own count; the actual number is uncertain), he was trying "to get to know my children better." The efforts involved in these two ventures--becoming a child, becoming a father--were rarely compatible.
David Sedaris starts out writing about undecided voters and, as with a lot of recent Sedaris stories--or is this just my imagination?--ends up in a depressing family anecdote.
I told my father that I had voted. "[My mother] let me," I said. "And I picked Nixon."
"Well, at least someone in the family has some brains." He patted me on the shoulder and as my mother turned away I understood that I had chosen the wrong person.
McCain supporters in North Carolina heckle early Obama voters:
That's classy.
It also kind of reminds me of Jill Lepore's recent New Yorker article about how we used to vote:
Voting in America, it's fair to say, used to be different. "Are you not a man in the full vigor of manhood and strength?" a member of the House Committee on Elections asked another Harrison supporter who, like Kyle, went to the polls but turned back without voting (and who happened to stand six feet and weigh more than two hundred pounds). The hearings established a precedent. "To vacate an election," an election-law textbook subsequently advised, "it must clearly appear that there was such a display of force as ought to have intimidated men of ordinary firmness."
The New Yorker on the Republican demonization of words:
Literary theorists used to say that their most abstruse prose was "writing the difficulty"--that the sentences were tortuous because there was no briskly commonsensical way of representing a complex issue. Sarah Palin, alas, talks the difficulty. She may claim, as she did in last Thursday’s Vice-Presidential debate, that "Americans are cravin' that straight talk," but they are sure not going to get it from the Governor--not with her peculiar habit of speaking only half a sentence and then moving on to another for spoliation, that strange, ghostly drifting through the haziest phrases, as if she were cruelly condemned to search endlessly for her linguistic home...
I love the art of letter-writing--it really is an art, and a lost one, and I miss the idea of it--and nothing captures it better than reading a great collection of letters, like the letters from Normal Mailer collected in last week's New Yorker.
There are loads of quotable passages, but I can't help but quote this letter to Don Delillo, the last sentence of which is just... wow:
What a terrific book [Libra]. I have to tell you that I read it against the grain. I've got an awfully long novel going on the CIA, and of course it overlapped just enough that I kept saying, "this son of a bitch is playing my music," but I was impressed, damned impressed, which I very rarely am. I think we keep ourselves writing by allowing the core of our vanity never to be scratched if we can help it, but I didn't get away scot-free this time.
The New Yorker editors have made their choice re: their endorsement for President. They've chosen (spoiler alert!) Obama.
The whole article's worthwhile, but I like this particular quote:
The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one--something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s "mere" speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.
The article spends a paragraph or two on a bunch of the major failures of the current administration: the economy, foreign policy/war in Iraq, the environment, &c. Condensed into a short article like this one, it's even more depressing to think about how our current government has done its best to ruin this country.
George Saunders, in "My Gal", from last week's New Yorker:
Where was I? Ah, yes: I hate Élites. Which is why, whenever I am having brain surgery, or eye surgery, which is sometimes necessary due to all my non-blinking, I always hire some random Regular guy, with shaking hands if possible, who is also a drunk, scared of the sight of blood, and harbors a secret dislike for me.
A gigantic tunnel boring machine, as featured in "The Long Dig" (abstract only, sorry) in last week's New Yorker:
Yes, it's come to this: I actually laughed at a New Yorker cartoon, today. But, but... it's so funny!
