All I can say is: Yankee, go home.
Last week, the photographer Matt Eich took The New Yorker’s Instagram feed with him to Sweetwater, Texas, for the Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup. At the roundup, held each year since 1958, thousands of wild rattlesnakes are captured, sold, displayed, and, often, killed as part of the week’s events. Click-through for a slideshow of Eich’s photos, and for more from Maria Lokke on his experience: http://nyr.kr/WONILl
BEST BOOKS I READ FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 2012
1. World’s Fair by E.L. Doctorow
2. The Long-Winded Lady: Notes From The New Yorker by Maeve Brennan
3. Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter
4. A Death In The Family by James Agee
5. The Last Days Of Disco, With Cocktails At Petrossian Afterwards by Whit Stillman
6. The Years Of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 1: The Path To Power by Robert Caro
7-8. Time Will Darken It and So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
9. The Friends Of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins
10. The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
THE BEST (NEW) MOVIES I SAW FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 2012
1. Moonrise Kingdom (W. Anderson)
2. Lincoln (Spielberg)
3. Oslo, August 31st (Trier)
4. The Kid With A Bike (Dardenne)
5. The Master (P.T. Anderson)
6. Bernie (Linklater)
7. Cosmopolis (Cronenberg)
8. Skyfall (Mendes)
9. Looper (Johnson)
10. probably something that I haven’t seen yet (Zero Dark Thirty, Holy Motors, whatever)
THE BEST (OLD) MOVIES I SAW IN 2012
1. Lawrence Of Arabia (Lean)
2. The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp (Powell and Pressburger)
3. Four Nights Of A Dreamer (Bresson)
4. Margaret (Lonergan)
5. Topsy-Turvy (Leigh)
6. Metropolitan (Stillman)
7. The Last Days Of Disco (Stillman)
8. Point Blank (Boorman)
9. Wild River (Kazan)
10. Spirited Away (Miyazaki)
11. Princess Mononoke (Miyazaki)
12. The French Connection (Friedkin)
13. Two English Girls (Truffaut)
14. The Friends Of Eddie Coyle (Yates)
Once…when my siblings and I were having a dinner-table debate about “designer babies,” my father jumped in. “The thing to remember,” he said, “is that when you eliminate the genes for shortness and baldness and anxiety, you eliminate the possibility of Woody Allen.”
“They Watch The Moon” (2010) by Trevor Paglen
Taken within the National Radio Quiet Zone, in West Virginia, where astronomers use sensitive radio telescopes to photograph distant galaxies. The site pictured here, in Sugar Grove, is widely believed to be an N.S.A. eavesdropping complex.
more here
“Of course I’m writing for people who are not born yet. Why else would you make anything?”
James Thurber on the cover of Time, July 9, 1951.
A never-before-published F. Scott Fitzgerald story in this week’s New Yorker. Short and potent. I very much enjoyed it, particularly this paragraph:
Smoking meant a lot to her sometimes. She worked very hard and it had some ability to rest and relax her psychologically. She was a widow and she had no close relatives to write to in the evenings, and more than one moving picture a week hurt her eyes, so smoking had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road.
Scripture.
Had he lived, John Cheever would have turned a hundred this week. Brad Leithauser posts on our Page-Turner blog in remembrance of his style, and his mastery of the art of the devastating phrase: http://nyr.kr/KLQnx4
Without knowing of any this, I just happened to read Bullet Park this week. An odd book but I liked it.
You are what you are
and you ain't what you ain't.
