The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
Jeff Wrangler:
Over my just-completed lunch today, I read John Seabrook's April 9 article that takes off from his highway spin-out on black ice. It was too long with too many digressions, but what Seabrook had to say on p. 33 about the writing of the Swiss geologist Albert Heim struck a chord.
Heim wrote about falls from great heights, but his description seemed to match my own experience in a fall from a relatively short height. When I was thrown from--OK, fell off--my horse in '09, time seemed to slow down. I clearly remember feeling that I was falling in slow motion, and I had the time to formulate in my mind the entire sentence, "When you hit the ground, roll, so the horse won't step on you." And that's exactly what I did. Yet that was not a very far fall.
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on April 10, 2018, 01:28:11 pm ---Heim wrote about falls from great heights, but his description seemed to match my own experience in a fall from a relatively short height. When I was thrown from--OK, fell off--my horse in '09, time seemed to slow down. I clearly remember feeling that I was falling in slow motion, and I had the time to formulate in my mind the entire sentence, "When you hit the ground, roll, so the horse won't step on you." And that's exactly what I did. Yet that was not a very far fall.
--- End quote ---
I got thrown by a horse in about 2012 or so. I had time, as I went headfirst over the horse's neck, to think, "Great, now I'm going to be out $11,000," because that's the out-of-network health-insurance deductible. Luckily, I was on the side of the dirt road, cushioned with soft pine needles and leaves. If I had rolled to avoid being stepped on I might have rolled down the mountain, so it's lucky I was more worried about the insurance. But I wasn't hurt enough to need a doctor's care. Just pretty bruised up, less from the impact of the fall than from being yanked off the saddle.
My friend Beth (another of our group of six or so) wasn't so lucky. When her horse saw what happened to mine, he threw her, too -- only she was in the middle of the hard-packed dirt road. She broke her pelvis and had to be carried off the trail on a stretcher. Then she had to spend the rest of our vacation (in Eureka Springs, AR), sitting on the big porch of the house we'd rented, taking opioids and being waited on. She needed help to get to the bathroom and a special elevated toilet attachment and when we flew back, she had to make arrangements for a wheelchair. Luckily, one member of our group was a nurse.
Even more luckily, Beth works for a hospital so has good employer-sponsored health insurance. Also, she comes from a family of nurses and doctors who were there to help her during the six weeks she had to stay home recovering.
Jeff Wrangler:
I thought this was interesting. I'm reading the April 9 article about the new CEO of Uber, and he shows up on the Today show this morning.
Jeff Wrangler:
Over lunch today I read Andrew Marantz's April 16 piece on Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook scandal. It reminded me that a long time ago, probably about the time the movie The Social Network came out, The New Yorker ran a piece about Zuckerberg. I don't remember who the author was, but I do remember that he was gay. I remember that when he confronted Zuckerberg with the concept that not all people want everything about their lives put "out there" for the rest of the world to know, Zuckerberg seemed unable even to comprehend why anyone wouldn't.
I can't say why. I haven't been able to put my finger on it. But somehow I feel as if there is a line between Zuckerberg's incomprehension and the current scandal. Maybe it has to do with not caring what's "out there," or where it's coming from. I don't know. I just feel that somehow there is a connection. ???
Front-Ranger:
The view got uninteresting from the plane around Missouri, so I brought out my New Yorker Magazine. In the packing rush, I grabbed a back copy for March 5, in which we had just discussed the Jordan Peterson article. But the longer article on Donald Glover was fascinating and so well written! How Tad Friend could relate and capture someone so different than himself was amazing to behold! Here are a few quotes that resonated with me:
"If you grew up knowing there was a bear in your future, because your dad kept telling you, ‘When you’re thirteen, you’re going to have to kill a bear,’ then, when you turned thirteen, you would kill the bear.” Beetz was baffled. “The bear,” she repeated. The door was still beeping, the way a jarring sound grows in a scene until you realize it’s an alarm clock and it was all a dream."
"he makes the city look both vast and confiningly tiny, as it might to an onlooker playing with a telescope."
"Earn and Van are feeling floaty and relaxed, enjoying each other—a setup for quarrels to come."
Nestled in the middle of the article on Glover is a recap of television's recent history that I found enlightening. "That creative breakthrough [the Sopranos] allowed shows to aim for smaller but more fervent audiences, to traffic not in quirky heroes but in flawed Everymen prone to depression and savagery."
And this point seemed very Brokieish: "Ambiguity has become a selling point, with nonlinear storytelling the new norm. Many dramas are designed to be solved or resolved online, where fans can collaborate to crack open the hidden Easter eggs."
Then it goes back to Glover's selling of the TV show "Atlanta" to the FX network and the concept of "Trojan-horsing". The FX CEO told Glover, "The parts that you’re worried we’re going to think are too weird—lean into those.” The CEO also said, "We’re in the business of making pieces of commercial television that mask deeper artistic narratives.”
And speaking of masks, "I feel like people are going to be writing essays twenty years from now on all the masks in the show...starting with why Earn is wearing a white mask.” A reveller is wearing what the script called an “innocent child face” mask, whose “black eyeholes peer into Earn’s soul.” How Brokieish is that!!
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