Category: Very Good Paragraphs

From Parul Sehgal’s New York Times review of , among others’:

Susan Sontag suffers from the same hamartia [as Julie Taymor, whose Spider-Man musical was a success, Mendelsohn apparently argues, not despite her own aesthetic betrayal, but because of it], according to Mendelsohn, who is endlessly fascinated by how the lack of self-knowledge makes self-betrayal inevitable. She belonged to the 19th century, he writes, which explains the “aspirations that were at odds with her temperament and her talent.” She insisted she be known as a storyteller, when the very qualities that made her so exciting a critic — the self-consciousness and “inability to resist any opportunity to interpret” — made her a clunky and banal novelist. The self, to Mendelsohn’s trained classicist’s eye, is gloriously rived. Forget reconciling its contradictions — the self can scarcely see them.

What makes it a good paragraph is the way it articulates what I’ve always felt but never been able to so well articulate: the limitations of my own fiction writing. It’s had its successes, but the truth of the matter is that all my instincts as a writer are toward obliterating mystery, not sustaining it. Much less creating it on a blank page. Ditto the bit about resisting interpretation. It’s a daring but in the end accurate charge to make against the author of “Against Interpretation”, but there Mendelsohn is, making it.

Unclear whose ideas I’m working with here, but I see my novelist banalities less as a innate scourge than as a momentary handicap. Like: I hope one day to be more interested in mystery. In the meantime, there’s NF to write.

I’m fully aware that people under the age of 60 write novels, and that many of them are actually very good. But how to do so when this perplexing world needs so much solving and sorting just to know how to get out of bed every morning remains a mystery to me. One maybe I could write a novel about.

Then again, I’m deluding myself if I think things are getting less perplexing as I age. Moral of this blog post: finish that damn novel.

Hot damn it’s a big night for good reading. From Garry Wills’s excoriation of loser Mitt Romney in the New York Review of Books:

Many losing candidates became elder statesmen of their parties. What lessons will Romney have to teach his party? The art of crawling uselessly? How to condemn 47 percent of Americans less privileged and beautiful than his family? How to repudiate the past while damaging the future? It is said that he will write a book. Really? Does he want to relive a five-year-long experience of degradation? What can be worse than to sell your soul and find it not valuable enough to get anything for it? His friends can only hope he is too morally obtuse to realize that crushing truth. Losing elections is one thing. But the greater loss, the real loss, is the loss of honor.

I could just as easily have quoted the whole post, which does vast impressive things in fewer than 750 words. If a Web editor went through and hyperlinked his claims to articles and studies, this might be one of the best pieces of Web writing I’ve ever seen. Then again, we’ve all got Google. (Tip to Adam Peterson on the find.)

This one’s three paragraphs, the ones that end Dan Chiasson‘s great review in the Novermber 2012 Harper’s of the Dictionary of American Regional English, and of slang more generally. It’s a classic approach to an ending—find a way to sub-/invert the fundamental idea lying beneath your subject—but what makes these grafs very good is how they articulate something regarding reading, speech, and writing that describes my life as a user of language in a way I’d never been able to articulate:

Urban Dictionary is endless fun, but most of its raids on the language will almost certainly fail. I wish more attention were paid to language that will not fail, or vanish, or linger in colorful local obscurity. I tire of the notion that everything lively and real starts with the vernacular. If you grew up shy, friendless, and isolated, as I did, you spent more time reading than speaking, and the assumed priority of speech over writing was, in a very real sense, reversed. I still cannot really speak a sentence of any distinction until I have drafted it in my head first.

As a result, my spoken English sounds (to me, at least) very “written” and even stodgy—not because I am aping the upper classes or the British or whomever, but because writing has had to come before speaking. I mention this because it seems to me basically wrong that the language grows only in one direction—from speech to writing—with inclusion in the dictionary representing the crowning achievement for any word that started life in the humble vernacular. People worry about slang making it into the dictionary, but what if the reverse started happening? What if the strangest and most beautiful words in the dictionary spilled out into language, as though the book had sprung a leak? Robert Frost wrote about wanting to “bring to book” speech that had never been treated as worthy of poetry, but Frost himself constantly replenished his own spoken language by reading Milton and Herrick.

Someone should write a book about the persistence of literary vocabulary in our daily speech, and about the social disconnect caused when people are perceived by their communities as having bewilderingly large vocabularies. My guess is that a lot of the informants who contributed to DARE spent time in little rural libraries where they kept big tattered dictionaries on a stand in the reference room. That’s where you used to find the lonely provincial kids who loved big words, and who grew up to be our Langston Hugheses and our Marianne Moores. I hope those kinds of kids still exist somewhere.

This one’s from Acocella’s review of Banville’s new one in the 8 October 2012 New Yorker. The paragraph turns to Banville’s ickiness in terms of personality, which isn’t why I think it’s very good. Banville can be whoever the hell he wants if he continues writing such sentences as “Remember what April was like when we were young, that sense of liquid rushing and the wind taking blue scoops out of the air and the birds beside themselves in the budding trees?” But look at what happens with time in this graf, the way Acocella runs through an event twice to kind of cross-list it in separate categories:

For some people, Banville is not a defender of art but a cold fish. His arrogance is legend. When he received the Booker for “The Sea,” he declared, in his acceptance speech, that it was “nice to see a work of art win the Booker Prize.” Soon afterward, he uncharacteristically tried to mitigate the offense. All he was trying to say, he explained, was that “there should be a decent prize for real books,” by which he seems to have meant heavily crafted, highbrow books like his own. That way, he figured, more publishers would buy such books, as opposed to what he called the “good, middlebrow fiction” that the Booker judges favored. This explanation, needless to say, made everything worse. [Ha!] As he tells it, he despises even his own work. His novels, he said to Belinda McKeon, in a 2009 Paris Review interview, were to him “an embarrassment and a deep source of shame. They’re better than anyone else’s, of course, but not good enough for me.” In 2005, he reviewed Ian McEwan’s novel “Saturday” in The New York Review of Books, and called it “a self-satisfied and, in many ways, ridiculous” book—a judgment that was met with considerable indignation in many quarters of London’s literary world, where McEwan is widely respected. In was later that year that Banville won the Booker, and honor that, under the circumstances, annoyed a lot of people. Then came his remarks on the middle-brow fiction being produced by his colleagues. Banville recalls that when he was young he had few friends in the literary world. By the end of 2005, he no doubt had fewer.

It ought not go unreported that my original transcription ended with the sentence, “By the end of 2005, he no doubt had a fever,” which might be better, Joan.

Yes, Harper’s, while edited by a woman, will never win any VIDA-based gender-balance-on-the-contents-page awards. Really, probably never. It’s maybe worse than the New Yorker in this regard. Of 23 credited names in the October 2012 issue, 3 are women’s. Even the Cox-Rathvons, 50 percent female, seem to have been absent from the Puzzle page.

But still it’s a really great magazine, with great and smart critics, two of whom I want to quote from here. First up is The Cupboard’s own Joshua Cohen, from his review of Jed Perl’s Magicians and Charlatans. Actually, it’s just Perl himself, a paragraph Cohen opts to quote in full, in a discussion on the ever-faddish union of high and low in art:

There are, however, essential differences between garbage then and garbage now. They are distinctions that would have been perfectly clear to Sontag and Kael, who had always taken for granted the significance of traditional artistic values, and who both, late in life, pointed out that they had never meant for camp or trash to trump old-fashioned quality. Pop Art and “Bad” Painting, in any event, were self-consciously ironic; they depended on the existence of a standard that was being mocked or from which one was registering a dissent. Irony, even in the whatever-the-market-will-bear forms that it often assumed in the 1980s and 1990s, was generally accompanied by at least the afterglow of a moral viewpoint. The artists were mocking something. They had a target. This is what has now changed. Laissez-faire aesthetics makes a mockery of nothing. Even irony is too much of an idea.

Next up, with two great grafs, is cranky old Bill Gass (which I have absolutely no license calling him), from his review of the new collection of Orwell’s letters:

The procedure Orwell adopts for his writing goes like this: find a social class (but the hunt should be among workmen, farmers, or outcasts, not the white-collar), insert yourself into that class, lead your daily life the way they do, dissolve what you learn into notes, and serve the result to the public. Your claim upon their attention will be this: The resulting text will be more detailed, correct, and informative than the competition’s—traveler’s reminiscences, tourist guides, memoirs, and other autobiographical equipment—because you are interested only in the “unfortunate,” because you want to reform society, not to enjoy the countryside or celebrate your good old life among the cannibals. Do you wish your readers to shed a tear over the impoverished condition of the exploited, or over your description of their plight? If you were really going to tell the truth about what you found along the way you would first have had to grow up among the crop you wished to harvest, which clearly you cannot accomplish. You would have to unknow things—how far in meters it is to the next town, Plato’s Symposium, the average life span of a lobsterman, Lawrence of Arabia, the cost of a pair of shoes in the desert. Oh, that last your subject may also know—perhaps you share something after all—but will you know how it feels if one day he has a pair that fits?

This, in a mostly adulatory review. Here’s its end:

In addition to social connections of a pragmatic or idealistic kind, there is a third way of understanding the relations of individuals to the state. It was first demonstrated, as far as I can calculate, by Socrates, when he refused to avoid his death penalty and escape Athens. We need to see society as an extension of ourselves, an invisible part of our anatomy that assists us every day without dominating us and that, like our own arms and legs, we tend when injured, and whose welfare we consider at all times. The relation resembles that of a violinist to his instrument—useful but more than something useful, cared for like an esteemed friend. If such a part of us fails, we do not discard it for a peg leg, nor are we fired from our job because we cannot play hopscotch. We may be a disposable member of the symphony, but our violin is us to us. The relation is sometimes—oh dear—called love.

These days, Harper’s may as well rename itself Doom-and-Gloom Pieces That Each End with Paragraphs Exhorting a Return to Social Democracy and Humane, Reasoned Discourse Monthly. Each one makes a good case, preaching as they are to this choir blogging about the same urgent thing. But here—because amid metaphor? because alongside great books?—is where I think it hits the homest.

From David Samuels’s profile of Obama in this month’s Harper’s:

He is living rent-free in an building historically occupied strictly by whites, fighting his battles and taking their money, yet in all this he is invisible—and he knows it. He is invisible because people refuse to see him. What they see is a reflection, in mirrors of distorting glass—a figment of their imaginations. He knows that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play, yet his sense of the limits of that role have caused him to overstay his hibernation. He is heir to a habitual and sometimes crippling sense of constraint that is partly his fault and partly ours.

This is a standalone section from Claire Hoffman’s outstanding profile of Seth MacFarlane in the June 18 2012 New Yorker:

On a Monday night last summer, MacFarlane jogged onto the stage of a jazz club called Vibrato, in Bel-Air. He had on a slim-cut Gucci suit and clutched a highball glass full of whiskey. Without acknowledging the seventeen-man band behind him, he grabbed the microphone.

“How’re you all doing!” he shouted. A group of middle-aged blond women, holding fast-emptying glasses of white wine, let out a lupine howl from the bar.

Onstage, MacFarlane cut a dapper, if somewhat contrived, figure. Smiling rakishly, he could have been a man auditioning for a part in a Rat Pack movie. “I’m a little under the weather tonight, so forgive me if I sound a little like Joy Behar,” he said. “We are just fucking winging it.” The band launched into “The Night They Invented Champagne.”

The song is one of the tracks on “Music Is Better Than Words,” which was released in September. MacFarland spent more than a year recording it, and, watching him onstage at Vibrato, you got the feeling that the album was the culmination of a lifelong fantasy—like the bar-mitzvah boy who finally gets to perform “Thriller” for a captive audience.

MacFarlane discovered Sinatra in college and was hooked by his stylized masculinity. “I instantly sparked to it because it was accessible, yet very challenging,” he said. He couldn’t stand the records his classmates listened to. “Nirvana made me want to blow my brains out.”

On the stage at Vibrato, eyebrows knit in concentration, MacFarlane looked truly happy. The bad was lush and smooth, and MacFarlane executed the songs with bloodless technical precision. Mid-set, he took a swig of bourbon and introduced his favorite song from “The Sound of Music. “This was written after Oscar Hammerstein died,” he said. Pause. Long drink. “That’s Rodgers and Hammerstein, for those of you who are fucking idiots.” He cackled and started into “Something Good,” his eyes closed tight, lost in Fräulein Maria’s sentimental paean to her captain: “Perhaps I had a wicked childhood. Perhaps I had a miserable youth. But somewhere in my wicked, miserable past, there must have been a moment of truth.” At a table near the front, a little boy asked his mother when MacFarlane would do the voice of Stewie.

Understatement! When will I learn how to do you?

From John Seabrook’s “The Song Machine”, an excellent dissection of contemporary pop’s songwriting process in the 26 March 2012 New Yorker:

Top Forty radio was invented by Todd Storz and Bill Stewart, the operator and program director, respectively, of KOWH, an AM station in Omaha, Nebraska, in the early fifties. Like most music programmers of the day, Storz and Stewart provided a little something for everyone. As Marc Fisher writes in his book “Something in the Air” (2007), “The gospel in radio in those days was that no tune ought to be repeated within twenty-four hours of its broadcast—surely listeners would resent having to hear the same song twice in one day.” The eureka moment, as Ben Fong-Torres describes it in “The Hits Just Keep on Coming” (1998), occurred in a restaurant across from the station, where Storz and Stewart would often wait for Storz’s girlfriend, a waitress, to get off of work. They noticed that even though the waitresses listened to the same handful of songs on the jukebox all day long, played by different customers, when the place finally cleared out and the staff had the jukebox to themselves they played the very same songs. The men asked the waitresses to identify the most popular tunes on the jukebox, and they went back to the station and started playing them, in heavy rotation. Ratings soared.

This graf is actually the second best one of the piece. The best reads this: “I know. I’m just saying. Pink’s looking for an urban song with a contemporary beat.”

I mean Jesus get in line, Pink.

From Peter Schjeldahl’s* review of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings currently on exhibit at Gagosian galleries around the world, in the 23 January New Yorker:

Duchamp remarked that art is created partly by its maker and partly by its audience. Hirst dumps pretty much the entire transaction into the audience’s lap. The result is art in the way that some exotic financial dealings are legal: by a whisker. Just as no law forbids the sale of bundled credit-default swaps on bundled subprime mortgages, no agreed-on aesthetic principle invalidates paintings that are churned out by proxy and then bid up at auction as fungible commodities. The “Why?” in such matters comes down to a historic, all-purpose, great “Why not?” A sense of frictionless impunity must be exciting if you’re on the supply side of the economy and the culture. If you aren’t, it feels wrong. The deadness of Hirst’s product lines—flipping the bird to anyone who naïvely craves more and better from art—upsets a lot of people. I deem their ire misdirected. Don’t shoot the messenger. Hirst honestly vivifies a situation in which the power of money celebrates itself by shedding all pretext of supporting illiquid values. When, in 2007, Hirst made a media event of fashioning and marketing a diamond-encrusted skull, “For the Love of God,” he as much as shouted the awful truth. (Whether or not the bibelot sold and, if so, fetched its asking price of fifty million pounds—some have doubted Hirst’s work on it—is an interesting but tangential questions.) In the course of one fair and square taunt after another, Hirst surely marvels at what he is abetted in getting away with. “The Complete Spot Paintings,” to his credit, makes no bones about what a certain precinct of the world has come to. What it come to next is somebody else’s move.

*I spelled this right the first time without having to check, which makes me not so much a good speller (or Germanic name-knower) but rather a total dumbass NYer fanboy.

From Alan Hollinghurst’s new one, The Stranger’s Child:

She could really play, couldn’t she?—that was Paul [Bryant (!!!)]’s first feeling. He looked around hastily at the others, with a bashful grin on his face. Was it Chopin? He saw them all deciding, staring at each other, frowning or nodding, some leaning to whisper. There was a noiseless sigh, a wave of collective recognition and relief that almost made the music itself unimportant: they’d got it. He didn’t want to show that he hadn’t. He had never seen anyone play the piano seriously and at close range, and it locked him into a state of mesmerized embarrassment, made worse by the desire to conceal it. There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had, and there was the sight of Mrs. Keeping in action, the plunges and stabs of her bare arms up and down the keyboard. She wasn’t a large woman—it was only her presence that was crushing. Her little hands looked grave and comical as they stretched and rumbled and tinkled. She rocked and jumped from one buttock to the other, in her stiff red dress, her black wrap slipping—it twitched and drooped behind her as she moved, with a worrying life of its own. The riveting, but almost unwatchable, thing was her profile, powdered and severe, shaken by twitches and nods, like tics only just kept under control. He stared, smiling tightly, and covering his mouth and chin intensively with his hand.

From Elif Batuman’s piece in the 19/26 Dec 2011 New Yorker on Göbekli Tepe, the oldest man-made thing in the world:

After my last afternoon at Göbekli Tepe, I decided to devote the rest of the day to the other Urfa pilgrimage—the Abraham one [Urfa claims to house a cave where Abraham was born]. I walked along teeming sidewalks, among street vendors selling pomegranates, lottery tickets, novelty Koreans, fresh pistachio nuts, sherbet, bitter coffee, photocopies. One man was literally selling snake oil—a thing I had never seen before—in addition to ant-egg oil, hair tonic, and unscented soap for pilgrims. Handbills advertised a conference called “Understanding the Prophet Abraham in the 21st Century.” A psychiatrist with a storefront office specialized in “ailments of the nerves and soul.” Most restaurants had signs that said “WE HAVE A FAMILY ROOM!”—meaning that the main dining room was for men only. About eighty-five per cent of the pedestrians were men. Nearly all the women were wearing head scarves, or even burkas. I saw one woman so pious that her burka didn’t even have an opening for her eyes. She was leaving a cell-phone store, accompanied by a teen-age boy wearing a T-shirt that said “RELAX MAN,” over a picture of an ice-cream cone playing an electric guitar. You wouldn’t thin an ice-cream cone could play an electric guitar, or would want to. I was reminded of Schmidt’s hypothesis that hybrid creatures and monsters, unknown to Neolithic man, are particular to highly developed cultures—cultures which have achieved distance from and fear of nature. If archaeologists of the future found this T-shirt, they would know ours had been a civilization of great refinement.

From Adam Kirsch’s review of recent books on H.G. Wells in the 17 October 2011 New Yorker:

Wells, who was in the audience at [Henry] James’s fiasco [with Guy Domville] and learned from the experience, had his own, considerably more chipper approach to the literary life. “It scarcely needs criticism to bring home to me that much of my work has been slovenly, haggard and irritated, most of it hurried and inadequately revised, and some of it as white and pasty in its texture as a starch-fed nun,” he admitted. But he was not unduly bothered by this: “I have to overwork, with all the penalties of overworking in loss of grace and finish, to get my work done.” Nor, for that matter, did Wells believe that he had any great gifts to squander. “The brain upon which my experiences have been written is not a particularly good one. If there were brain-shows, as there are cat and dog shows, I doubt if it would get even a third class prize.”

I especially love the way Kirsch has taken three separate quotations (no idea on their textual source) and formed them into a kind of frank logic. And but mostly I love the sentiment. More and more these days the idea of waiting to publish until I think a book is great is like a poison I have to keep from infecting my not particularly good brain. Write a book a year, send it out and about, rejoice in any publication, move on from all rejection and write a new book in the new year. Die if not happy then at least happier.

From Peter Hessler’s bit on a small-town druggist in the 26 September 2011 New Yorker:

In his will, [former customer] Mr. Brick left more than half a million dollars in cash and stock to the local druggist[, Don]. After taxes and other expenses, it came to more than three hundred thousand dollars, which was almost exactly what the community owed Don Colcord [for drugs and other services rendered]. But Don didn’t seem to connect these events. He talked about all three subjects—neglecting his dying brother, offering credit to the townspeople, and helping Mr. Brick and receiving his gift—in different conversations that spanned more than a year. He probably never would have mentioned the money that was owed to him, but somebody in Nucla told me and I asked about it. From my perspective, it was tempting to apply a moral calculus, until everything added up to a neat story about redemption and reward in a former utopian community. But Don’s experiences seemed to have taught him that there is something solitary and unknowable about every human life. He saw connections of a different sort: these people and incidents were more like the spokes of a wheel. They didn’t touch directly, but each was linked to something bigger, and Don’s role was to try to keep the whole thing moving the best he could.

This, in a piece where the author’s self is kept chiefly out of the action. Some of the best NF writing on NF I’ve seen in a long while.

Two of them, this time. Pretend there’s no paragraph break. From Adam Gopnik’s review of declinist literature in the 12 September 2011 New Yorker:

Despite their title [of That Used to Be Us], the authors [Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum] seem, for instance, determined to avoid the obvious point that one American who shares their outlook and ambitions in almost every detail—who hates partisan wrangling, doubts the wisdom of big foreign wars, proposes a faith in a brisk mixture of private enterprise and public guarantees, accepts the priority of rebuilding our infrastructure—is the President of the United States. If he’s been frustrated, it’s not because of some vague “systemic” political paralysis. It’s because, as he has been startled to discover … there is another side, inexorably opposed to these apparently good things. The reason we don’t have beautiful new airports and efficient bullet trains is not that we have inadvertently stumbled upon stumbling blocks; it’s that there are considerable numbers of Americans for whom these things are simply symbols of a feared central government, and who would, when they travel, rather sweat in squalor than surrender the money to build a better terminal. They hate fast trains and efficient airports for the same reason that seventeenth-century Protestant hates the beautiful Baroque churches of Rome when they saw them: they were luxurious symbols of an earthly power they despised. Friedman and Mandelbaum wring their hands at “our” unwillingness to sacrifice our comforts on behalf of our principles, but Americans are perfectly willing to sacrifice their comforts for their ideological convictions. We don’t have a better infrastructure or decent elementary education exactly because many people are willing to sacrifice faster movement between our great cities, or better informed children, in support of their belief that the government should always be given as little money as possible.

The reasons for these feelings are, of course, complex, with a noble reason descending from the Revolutionary War, and its insistence on liberty at all costs, and an ignoble one descending from the Civil War and its creation of a permanent class of white men convinced that they are besieged by an underclass they regard as the subsidized wards of the federal government. (Thus the curious belief that a worldwide real-estate crisis that his the north of Spain and the east of Ireland as hard as the coast of Florida was the fault of money loaned by Washington to black people.) But the crucial point is that this is the result of an active choice, not passive indifference: people who don’t want high-speed rail are not just indifferent to fast trains. They are offended by fast trains, as the New York Post is offended by bike lanes and open-air plazas: these things give too much pleasure to those they hate. They would rather have exhaust and noise and traffic jams, if such things sufficiently annoy liberals. Annoying liberals is a pleasure well worth paying for. As a recent study in the social sciences shows [PDF], if energy use in a household is monitored so that you can watch yourself saving money every month by using less, self-identified conservatives will actually use and spend more, apparently as a way of showing their scorn for liberal pieties…. The kind of outlook that Friedman and Mandelbaum assume is somehow natural to mankind and has been thwarted here recently—a broad-minded view of maximizing future utility—has, from a historical perspective, a constituency so small as to be essentially nonexistent. In the long story of civilization, the moments when improving your lot beats out annoying your neighbor are vanishingly rare.

“‘Getting kind of’?” (This is you talking back at me.) “Try ‘always has been’.”

I know, right? It’s like an advertisement for my own dull self-importance. I should spend more time dishing, or endorsing products and various artworks. But I consume artworks years after the Internet does, because I am cheap. Did you see Source Code? It was kind of great. Also: D’Agata’s About a Mountain.

At any rate, this is from September’s Harper’s, specifically Garret Keizer’s cover story on teaching (all of which is incredibly great, to the point that I may actually sit down and dorkily write Mr. Keizer a letter telling him so):

One of the more remarkable and, I think, telling things about the teaching trade is the number of people who need to believe that you love it. Ever since leaving the classroom in the mid-Nineties and throughout the past year I found people asking if I missed teaching or had plans to take it up again. They didn’t want to know; they wanted to hear me say yes. Some didn’t bother to ask. “I know the pay is not the greatest, but you’re doing what you love”—a sentiment that puts me in mind of the trope of the happy slave. In fact, our word pedagogue derives from a Greek word for a type of slave who led children to school [true! ugh!]. Jim is Huck Finn’s teacher not only in spirit but in accordance with an ancient tradition. This is not to suggest that contemporary teachers are slaves or that I was ever treated like one, only that I am inclined to distrust people who expect me to work for love, or who need a sentimental mythology to gloss over the impossibilities of my job and the daily injustices it lays bare.

It occurs to me that Robin Williams has played this mythic teacher twice. But then again he had to star in both Jack and Bicentennial Man so I guess that’s penance enough.

(Insider for teachers only [everyone else click away], a sentence from elsewhere in the piece: “I did on one or two occasions tell my students they were living in a society that values people of their age, region, and class primarily as cannon fodder, cheap labor, and gullible consumers, and that education could give them some of the weapons necessary to fight back.” Believing in this sentence’s truth makes me feel naive and now I know what faith feels like.)

From David Thomson’s “When Is a Movie Great?” from the July Harper’s:

I love Citizen Kane. I have nothing against it winning [British film magazine Sight & Sound‘s annual best-movie-ever poll] forever, if we must have a best film of all time. (And we don’t; few of us would seriously heed the call for the greatest symphony, novel, painting, building, Indian dinner, or soccer match.) But Kane isn’t a dinosaur, despite its lofty placement. Seventy years after its opening, we still feel the ways in which Orson Welles enlarged the language of film and the scope of its storytelling. Citizen Kane is a tragedy about the evanescence of meaning, and (by today’s standards) a searching inquiry into character and the nature of power in America. When some claimed that last year’s The Social Network was the “new Citizen Kane,” that was an indicator of falling standards and a valiant effort to keep movies “relevant.” The Social Network is a smart, narrow entertainment, full of spite. Citizen Kane is beautiful because it means so much, yet finds that meaning has become a lost world.