Good for the Post Story Lab. Steve Hendrix noticed this line in a New Yorker blog item and posted about it: "The biggest play of the game may have been Alex Ovechkin’s open-ice demolition of Jagr, which led to a quick Russian goal and an arena-wide gasp (it was the hockey equivalent of the collapse of the North Tower)."

Like Hendrix, I'm a big fan of NYer writer Nick Paumgarten, but what a bizarre comparison. One other blogger thought the same: "I mean, I love me some Ovechkin talk on newyorker.com, but this may be a tad inappropriate." (The one funny thing was Hendrix's initial post title, still reflected in the URL: "But what can he do with curling?") No one else on the Internet seemed to notice. I posted the line and Story Lab link on Facebook yesterday, and friends were similarly mystified.

But as the day rolled on, friend Andy noticed the New Yorker quietly removed the North Tower reference. No explanation, no note. The line lost its parenthetical and joined with the next sentence, "The biggest play of the game may have been Alex Ovechkin’s open-ice demolition of Jagr, which led to a quick Russian goal and an arena-wide gasp, but Datsyuk’s defensive work, as resolute an expression of skill as any spinorama or one-timer, was the secret to Russia’s success."

Not a cool way to edit online, New Yorker. See the post here.

Claire Keegan's "Foster" is what you read leaning against the handle of the refrigerator as the water boils and your wine glass gets lonely on the counter. You continue to read the story through the meal and, returning the plate to the sink, as your clothes washer spins off in the hall, then the dryer. Most of the sentences in the story gaze outward but every fourth or so looks in. A line looking in? "I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be."

Right now… I'm in search of awesome. That's what I've decided.

Colliding with the above story about a little Irish girl, I've posted this similarly (seriously) themed Wilco song before but never this version.

My refrigerator is covered with stuff, out of a lack of any bulletin board and a belief that fridges are where magnets should go. Covering much of the space and held by the many magnets are magazine-torn poems.

Many, of course, come from The New Yorker, so when friend Katie said she clipped poems from its pages, I got inspired to mention my fridge rips here. I've been thinking about throwing them out, if just to start over. But NYer poetry hasn't done much for me recently. And I like the pages when I'm making dinner. Like the pots on the stove, they give distance on the day. The steam makes all of the specifics matter less.

"In a Haystack," Andrea Cohen.
"Clouds," Charles Simic.
"The Indivisibles," Campbell McGrath.
"Element It Has," Glyn Maxwell.
"Oppression," Marvin Bell.
"Wise," Elizabeth Macklin.
"Here You Are," Michael Blumenthal.
"Troy," Meghan O'Rourke.
"Our Flowers," Barbara Ras.

For a week early in my freshman year at Northwestern, 11 years ago, Claude Levi-Strauss was the bane of my existence. The class was art, "Introduction to Visual Culture," and I struggled. While I couldn't fully grasp the concept of negative space, I knew I was in it. And Claude? At one in the class, we watched an early film of Haitian voodoo dance. The film involved Levi-Strauss in some way. Whether he had made the film, done the research or danced his jeans off, I never understood.

Upon further review, Levi-Strauss > Katherine Dunham > Maya Deren.

But even still, after reading Patricia Marx's holiday shopping round-up in a recent New Yorker, the first thing I did was Google her mention of Squirrel Underpants. The second thing was post her take on mini gifts:

Claude Levi-Strauss believed that the appeal of a miniature has to do with its being a scaled-down replica, and therefore easier to grasp than the big, messy totality:

To understand a real object in its totality we always tend to work from its parts. The resistance it offers us is overcome by dividing it. Reduction in scale reverses this situation. Being smaller, the object as a whole seems less formidable. By being quantitatively diminished, it seems to us qualitatively simplified. More exactly, this quantitative tranposition extends and diversifies our power over a homologue of the thing, and by means of it the latter can be grasped, assessed and apprehended at a glance

is part of what Levi-Strauss wrote, proving that his case applies to paragraphs, too.

Ha! Take that, Levi-Strauss. Shopping vs. anthropology takedown!

I didn't know Rachel Wetzsteon, but I read her obituary in yesterday's New York Times and wondered some. "Rachel Wetzsteon, a prominent poet whose work was known for its mordant wit, formal elegance and cleareyed examination of the solitary yet defiant lives of single women, was found dead on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 42. Ms. Wetzsteon, who died apparently late on Dec. 24 or early on the 25th, committed suicide, said her mother, Sonja Wetzsteon. She had been severely depressed in recent months, partly over the breakup of a three-year romance, her mother said." The poem in her obit is good, but most moving for me now is "Love and Work" from The New Yorker.

"When I think of you I find the nearest lamp and turn it on."

If you don't have a registration, the poem is here as well.

I hate posting the last graf of an article, but once again Adam Gopnik leaves me no choice. From his latest piece, on van Gogh and Gauguin:

It’s true that the moral luck dramatized by modern art involves an uncomfortable element of ethical exhibitionism. We gawk and stare as the painters slice off their ears and down the booze and act like clowns. But we rely on them to make up for our own timidity, on their courage to dignify our caution. We are spectators in the casino, placing bets; that’s the nature of the collaboration that brings us together, and we can sometimes convince ourselves that having looked is the same as having made, and that the stakes are the same for the ironic spectator and the would-be saint. But they’re not. We all make our wagers, and the cumulative lottery builds museums and lecture halls and revisionist biographies. But the artist does more. He bets his life.

The phrase that obviously comes to mind is "carpe diem," but at this point in the year, it's worth going to Horace's hows and whys as well. You can't seize the day like a jerk. Reasons via Wikipedia, with edits:

Don't ask (it's forbidden to know) what end
the gods will grant to me or you, Leuconoe. Don't play with Babylonian
fortune-telling either. It is better to endure whatever will be.
Whether Jupiter has allotted to you many more winters or this final one
which even now wears out the Tyrrhenian sea on the facing cliffs
— be wise, drink your wine, and scale back your long hopes
to a short period. While we speak, envious time will have already fled
Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next.

(I seized the day tonight with an Elevation burger. How bout you?)

Adam Gopnik, on cookbooks, gives the graf of the food issue:

The desire to go on desiring, the wanting to want, is what makes you turn the pages — all the while aware that the next Boston cream pie, the sweet-salty-fatty-starchy thing you will turn out tomorrow, will be neither more nor less unsatisfying than last night’s was. When you start to cook, as when you begin to live, you think that the point is to improve the technique until you end up with something perfect, and that the reason you haven’t been able to break the cycle of desire and disillusion is that you haven’t yet mastered the rules. Then you grow up, and you learn that that’s the game.

Been a while since a New Yorker listing really did it for me:

MOMA has reinstalled Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies,” a nearly forty-two-foot-long triptych, along with related paintings, in a room of its wondrous own, with a couch. Bring a snorkel. Dry paint never made for wetter effects than in the engulfing expositions of the Giverny ponds and gardens, which filled the last years of the artist, as he adjusted to the handicap of cataracts. (He died in 1926.) Get as close as you like to the nubbly surfaces of the triptych, with its candid brushstrokes that skitter and clot; your gaze will stay drenched in an aqueous sublime. Pinkish summer clouds aren’t so much reflected as drowned in turquoise, violet, and mud-green depths. Monet knew palpably, at each point, what all his colors were up to. Everything answers, resoundingly, to everything else. The tone of the next biggest, single-panel panorama is a soprano, silvery shimmer, suggesting water less than polychrome steam.

The more things change… I find myself dog-earring the same corners. From "Complicity," the Julian Barnes story in a New Yorker last week:

I used the word "complicity" a bit ago. I like the word. To me, it indicates an unspoken understanding between two people, a kind of pre-sense, if you like. The first hint that you may be suited, before the nervous trudgery of finding out whether you "share the same interests," or have the same metabolism, or are sexually compatible, or both want children, or however it is that we argue consciously about our unconscious decisions. Later, looking back, we will fetishize and celebrate the first date, the first kiss, the first holiday together, but what really counts is what happened before this public story: that moment, more of pulse than of thought, which goes, Yes, perhaps her, and Yes, perhaps him.

I tried to explain this to Ben, a few days after his party. Ben is a crossword-doer, a dictionary lover, a pedant. He told me that "complicity" means a shared involvement in a crime or a sin or a nefarious act. It means planning to do something bad.

I prefer to keep the term as I understand it. For me, it means planning to do something good. She and I were both free adults, capable of making our own decisions. And nobody plans to do anything bad at that moment, do they?

The story reminds me of one I cut from Tribune's short-story contest 10 or 11 years ago and probably still have in a box somewhere — Sharon Wahl's "I Also Dated Zarathustra." I liked the story then but, then 18, didn't get much of it. Here are the two grafs I got and the subsequent one I didn't grasp, like the rest of the story, until rereading this week:

It was a warm night, with lots of neon. It was one of those nights when the world seemed to be made not of people, but of couples. Everywhere I looked bodies were paired together, connected at the hands or more tightly around the waist, awkward animals walking with a tilt and lean, off-balance, unsymmetrical. They reminded me of those children’s books with the pages cut in three, each section the top, middle, or bottom of an animal, so that the normal old heads and legs and bellies could be made into sillier creatures: a salamousowl, a girelephish, a pandazebrogator.

And yes, I wanted to be part of it all. Of course I did. Oh, to be damply interlaced at the palms. To be affectionately leashed, tethered in the crowded streets, appended. To make a wider obstacle on the sidewalk, a wandering self-absorption that others had to navigate, rather than this narrow thing that darts and slips politely by.

But Zarathustra understood nothing of this. He would walk between or duck under the arms of people clearly together, something I by instinct could not do. It was impossible to truly accompany him, to predict and accommodate his walking speeds or stopping places. He seemed to resent being tied down, even by gravity. He walked with high fast steps and frequently bumped into things. Really he couldn’t see very well; until he was at arm’s length he wasn’t completely certain what he was looking at. This meant that everything out of reach was immensely interesting, and the things close by merely obstacles.

NYer: "As a rough rule, cinema can be sundered into two halves: six o’clock films and nine o’clock films. Most movies are nine-o’clock affairs, and none the worse for it. You get home from work, grab something to eat, and head to the theatre, and enjoy the show. And so to bed — alone or entwined, but, either way, with dreams whose sweetness will not be crumbled or soured by what you saw onscreen. A six o’clock movie requires more organization: prebooked tickets, a restaurant table, the right friends. You’re going to need them, because if all runs according to plan you will spend the second half of the evening tossing the movie — the impact and substance of it — back and forth."

A few lines later in the piece: "'The Reader' is a nine o’clock movie that thinks its a six o’clock. 'Groundhog Day' is the opposite."