The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
Front-Ranger:
"The Cabaret Beat" WAS a good read, I agree. But I wondered as it meandered into a history of the author, Ian Frazier, his father, the New Yorker editor and founder Harold Ross, the MacKay family founder (John), Mark Twain, MacKay's wife Louise, their youngest son Clarence, his wife Katherine Duer, and a great granddaughter Katherine Barrett Swett before coming back to the subject of the story, Ellin MacKay Berlin, and her husband Irving Berlin. I settled down to read the rest of their story, but wait! The article then veered off into Irving (ne Israel) Berlin's family history starting in Siberia. Then back to John and Clarence MacKay with cameos from Leopold Stokowski and the Prince of Wales, back to Ross and TNY, and finally winding up with Ellin and her 2 articles, finishing with an interview with her aged daughter. Whew!!
Jeff Wrangler:
I've just started the article on Apple's designer and wonder whether I really need to read it.
Hilton Als on Langston Hughes was interesting.
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on March 03, 2015, 02:22:55 pm ---I've just started the article on Apple's designer and wonder whether I really need to read it.
--- End quote ---
Well, I forced myself through to the bitter end of this article. I suppose it's timely because of the current hoo-hah over the Apple watch.
Tell you what, by the time I finished the article, I had the creepy feeling that Apple isn't a company or a line of products: It's a cult.
Jeff Wrangler:
Good God! GOOD GOD! I CANNOT believe this!
I just started John McPhee's latest piece on writing (March 9 issue), and I am shocked, SHOCKED, to learn that as late as the year 2000, John McPhee--JOHN McPHEE--did not know the word sprezzatura.
This shocks me because I've known that word since, oh, roughly 1978, when Dr. William Leigh Taylor, the very sexy Virginian who was my college Shakespeare professor as well the teacher of various other undergraduate English courses that I took, used the word in a class on some Renaissance subject or other and defined it for us students more or less the way McPhee defines it: "Doing something cool without apparent effort."
(My academic advisor in the History Department had such a high regard for Dr. Taylor that he told me it didn't matter what course Dr. Taylor taught, I was to take it. ;D )
I still can't believe that John McPhee, published author and teacher at Princeton, did not know the meaning of sprezzatura until 2000. To think that I knew a word like sprezzatura at least two decades before John McPhee! :o
Front-Ranger:
Well, I bet that made your day! Guess it's time for you to start writing 25,000-word articles on the most arcane of subjects!
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