Falling off the wagon of regular reading for a month, I'm probably feeling the effects or, more likely, misjudging them and feeling that. But a pairing in the March 17 New Yorker helps me back on for a moment.

The first passage comes from Adam Gopnik's "Modern Magic and the Meaning of Life," a sleight-of-hand personal narrative, unfortunately not online, with a moment of an experienced magician watching a newcomer's try.

"He was appealing — he did have a nice persona," Swiss said, leaning into the table. "He could do the moves. But he tore the dollar up slowly, like this." Swiss replicated the young magician's careful, studied action. "Why? Why would you tear it up slowly? Nobody tears a dollar bill up in the first place, but, if you're going to tear up a dollar bill at all, you'd tear it up quickly, in a sudden fit, zip-zip-zip." He demonstrated. "The only reason you would tear a dollar bill up slowly is if you were doing something else to it at the same time — if you were doing a goddamn magic trick. So right away we're off in the magic land of 'I have in my hand an ordinary deck of cards.' But, O.K., let's live with that. Why are you tearing it up? Are you doing it angrily? Gaily? Why are you asking me to watch you tear up a dollar bill? The method is not the trick. The method is never the trick. Once you've mastered the method, you've hardly begun the trick."

Right after Gopnik comes John Burnside's "The Bell Ringer" fiction.

The bell ringers were continuing a tradition that had once been central to the life of the community, and she liked to think that only a generation ago, whenever these bells had rung out over the fields and the streets, everyone had known what they were saying. A call to worship; a royal wedding; an armistice; an enemy attack. Everyone would have understood those signals, because those were the public events, those were the facts. Yet surely there had been something else, another music inside the public proclamations, and there must have been those who could hear more than the facts, gifted listeners who could pick out the subtleties in the way one bell worked against the others, say, or in the pauses when one ringer stopped, weary or undecided, or touched with the knowledge of imminent mortality. Now the bells were nothing but background — pure atmosphere, a little local color –but perhaps there were still souls in this very parish who could decipher the inner workings of a bell ringer's mind, just by listening. … With every pull on the bell rope, she might be confiding everything to some old man in the almshouses at the far end of the village, or to some dying woman in one of the cottages out by the woods; some seasoned listener who would set aside a book or a pile of darning and listen awhile, wondering who it was that was giving herself away.

Bells, chalkboard, why anyone asks anyone to watch. "The Bell Ringer" considers the ties, probably worthless and detrimental, between stuck-on-signal and stuck-on-listen.

Do you live in New York? If so, you need to go somewhere for me. The New Yorker Festival is coming up fast, and many of this blog's favorites are going to be there.

Who, you ask? Scheduled are: Edward P. Jones ("Volvo," "By twenty five," "D.C., New York, memory"), Karen Russell ("Reading Karen Russell," "The cover: The word 'Stories' in the wolf's bite") Jonathan Franzen ("Sending the tablet into the sea," "On reading"), Orhan Pamuk ("All the drunk collected tokens," "The best part of the 'Journeys' issue"), Malcolm Gladwell ("A most reasonable 'fro," "Before the Super Bowl"), Jeffrey Toobin, and many more. Enough? I want John McPhee to canoe-surf the crowd, but I'm not holding my breath.

In the May 22 New Yorker (I'm way behind), Anthony Lane's article on adventurer and writer Patrick Leigh Fermor brought up a passage from Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts, which I've never read and probably never will. Towing a captured general across 1944 Crete and trying to make it to the coast, Leigh Fermor gave us this passage, which Lane quotes:

During a lull in the pursuit, we woke up among the rocks just as a brilliant dawn was breaking over the crest of Mount Ida. We had been toiling over it, through snow and then rain, for the last two days. Looking across the valley at this flashing mountain-crest, the general murmured to himself:

Vides ut alte stet nive candidum
Soracte …

It was one of the ones I knew! I continued from where he had broken off:

nec jam sustineant onus
Silvae laborantes, geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto,

and so on, through the remaining five stanzas to the end. The general's blue eyes had swivelled away from the mountain-top to mine — and when I'd finished, after a long silence, he said: "Ach so, Herr Major!" It was very strange. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.

Lane went on to name Horace Odes 1.9 — so the Soracte did seem familiar. I got to Googling and came up with an Oxford translation that seemed too stiff. Looking deep on my drive, I came up with my high school translation and it seemed too amateur. Googling again, a University of Chicago-printed version turned up on a Purdue site, and it was just right.

See, the snows on Mount Soracte glare against
the sky, and the branches strain, giving way
eneath the weight, and the fluent
waters stand fast, fixed by the bitter freeze.

Take the chill off, piling plenty of logs
by the fireside, and pour out the wine, four years
aging, from the Sabine jar,
Thaliarchus, with a free hand.

Leave the rest to the gods, for once they quiet
the winds that are warring with the roaring
sea, cypress and ancient
ashtree are troubled no longer.

Do not ask of tomorrow what it may hold;
mark in the black each day you are granted
by Chance: you are young, no
sneering at loving and dancing

while the sap rises and whining old age
stays away. now is the time for playing field
and public squares with soft
whispers as night covers lovers meeting,

and now is the time for giveaway giggles
from the far corner and the girl in hiding,
and the prize snatched from her
arm or finger that (almost) resists.

New Yorker, Dec. 20 and 27, 2004. Winter Fiction issue.

Aside one. Jeffrey Toobin's "High Tea" is worth sticking around to the end.

Aside two. W.G. Sebald writes "An Attempt at Restitution," about life in Germany after World War II, especially life in Stuttgart.

Local Pulitzer winner Edward P. Jones adds "Adam Robinson." The man whom the story surrounds thinks about the city's trees, especially the ones that don't get the love of the cherry blossoms. As someone who grew up under a Washngton oak tree, I appreciate his thoughts.

And then there's a sampling of Robert Lowell's letters to Elizabeth Bishop.

"All the rawness of learning, what I used to think should be done with by twenty-five. Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing-I suppose that's what vocation means-at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction, so I'm thankful, and call it good, as Eliot would say."

New Yorker, March 14, 2005.

About Charles Bukowski's poetry.

"I usually write ten or fifteen [poems] at once," he said, and he imagined the act of writing as a kind of entranced combat with the typewriter, as in
his poem "cool black air": "now I sit down to it and I bang it, I don't use the light / touch, I bang it."

Further on, John Updike reviews Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Updike includes a passage where Grandma recounts her husband's departure:

Why are you leaving me?
He wrote, I do not know how to live.
I do not know either, but I am trying.
I do not know how to try.

To explain her own narrow and static life, she proposes, "That's been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing."

New Yorker, Aug. 18 and 25, 2003. The Family Issue.

James Surowiecki writes in Talk of the Town's Financial Page.

Economists have long argued that a child is analogous to a "consumer durable," like a refrigerator. Parents invest time, energy, and money in the child, and in exchange, as the child grows up, they get what the economist Gary Becker has called "psychic income"-as opposed to the real income that children in, say, an agrarian economy could bring in when they grew strong enough to help with the harvest. Becker observed a correlation in the United States between birth rates and the business cycle. When the economy is bad, people tend to have fewer kids. When it picks up, they have more. Although there are obvious limits to this point of view (we're evolutionarily programmed to want children but not refrigerators), it does suggest that, as with most goods, if kids are more expensive, people will accumulate fewer of them.

Great narrative journalist Katherine Boo writes "The Marriage Cure." She also does an interview with the magazine's Web site.

"My memory is proglottidean, like the tapeworm, but unlike the tapeworm it has no head, it wanders in a maze, and any point may be the beginning or the end of its journey." So begins "The Gorge," by Umberto Eco, in the Mar. 7 New Yorker issue. Throwing a ridiculously word into the first sentence like that … I don't like it, but I look it up anyway. Here. The rest of the story is great.

Pages earlier, there's a cartoon more my speed. A bored-looking boss tells a too-smiley interviewee, "What the hell? We could use an idiot."

Adam Gopnik toes the intellectual line in the back of the book. Voltaire, Gopnik writes, was "thrown into the Bastille twice for being generally annoying."

When the topic gets to religion, we go pop: "Voltaire was in favor of a benign, supervisory God in the way that British leftists used to be in favor of the Queen, or in the way that Yankee free agents are in favor of Joe Torre; it's nice to think that someone genial is overseeing things."

More? The watches of the watch company Voltaire began "became the Ben & Jerry's ice cream of the later Enlightenment, a luxury good that was also a sign of progressive values."

Measure for measure, Nancy Franklin writes about a new TV series and describes one character as "SpongeJoe KhakiPants."

The referencing is thankfully absent from the key lines in Talk of the Town: "Hunter S. Thompson, who killed himself last week in his house in Woody Creek, near Aspen, Colorado, was a high-strung, thin-skinned, programmatically dissipated workaholic, inveterately suspicious of authority, perpetually worried that his best days were behind him, and unable to deal with the attention and success that he scrambled and sweated for many years to achieve. In other words, he was a magazine writer."

Nov. 8, 2004 issue. A Marah tape that arrived in the mail recently is what stops my eye among the listings.

P.S. 1 CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER 22-25 Jackson Ave., at 46th Ave., Long Island City (718-784-2084) – "This is not debris," warns a trompe-l'oeil handwritten note in one of Manny Farber's busy tabletop still-lifes. "Each of the items means something." Indeed, the candy bars, flowers, eggs, vegetables, toys, tools, postcards of famous paintings, and so forth that crowd Farber's bird's-eye-view arrangements are rendered with the intensity of purpose of items in a rebus. … Through Jan. 16. (Open Thursdays through Mondays, noon to 6.)

The concert tape finds the band covering The Faces' Debris. I don't know The Faces well — not enough to distinguish their material from Rod Stewart's solo work — but Debris grabs at your heart. Ronnie Lane sings the song about his father, but the lines could apply to most pairings. The young man and woman on the cover of this issue, for instance. Their subway trains sit next to each other in the station, and they look up to see each other and find they're reading the same book. Their stories go back, and the trains go on.

"Talk of the Town" fills me with facts. Do you know who actor Paul Giamatti's father was? His father was Bart Giamatti, the Major League Baseball commissioner. Do you know why the Native American crossed the river? To get to the other side, apparently.

Then there is a moral lesson. Sort of. Rachel Cohen writes the unline "Can You Forgive Him?" and illuminates history we all should know.

In the 1800s, Thomas Carlyle spent forever writing a book about the French Revolution. Carlyle loaned the only copy of his draft to John Stuart Mill for Mill to take a look and offer suggestions. But then the copy burned under mysterious circumstances at Mill's house. Not good.

But for all those who have lost work to a friend, computer robbery, computer crash or Blogger disruption, it is important to note that Carlyle didn't get angry. His friendship with Mill would fall out much later in their lives, with unrelated instances at fault, but at the time he would write Mill a letter of forgiveness. True, the book that burned was gone, but he could try again.

Singular enough, the whole Earth could not get it back; but only a better or worse one. There is the strangest dimness over it. A figure thrown into the melting-pot; but the metal (all that was golden or goldlike of that, –and copper can be gathered) is there; the model also is, in my head. O my Friend, how easily might the bursting of some puny ligament or filament have abolished all light there too! … That I can write a Book on the French Revolution is (God be thanked for it) as clear to me as ever; also that, if life be given me so long, I will.

Good lesson. Would I ever read a huge book on the French Revolution? Probably not. The back of this issue offers more likely reading for folks like myself. Meghan O'Rourke profiles the late Edward Stratemeyer, founder of the writing syndicate that invented Carolyn Keene and Franklin W. Dixon and wrote the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books. Love the Hardy Boys. I remember sitting next to the reference wall in the Chevy Chase Library and looking up Dixon in quasi-Who's Who of authors. Reading the blurb and discovering the syndicate, I don't remember feeling disappointed. I think I felt a little proud of my detective work.

In retrospect, it's amazing how much we read early in our lives and how little we read later. The "Briefly Noted" books in this issue include a new biography of John James Audubon, who bankrupted himself before spending a zillion dollars on the big book of birds that would make him famous. With his liquidity troubles surprising me, I realize my knowledge of Audubon leaves off at John Audubon, Boy Naturalist. Despite the reputation of their recognizable covers (deep blue), the Childhood of Famous Americans series only tackles so much.

We read different things we grow up. We read Wallace Stevens for school projects and don't learn a thing. So when David Friend writes "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackberry (With apologies to Wallace Stevens)," we can't compare Friend's poem to Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." But we are amused anyway. When Friend's poem doesn't make it online, a poster in a Prairie Home Companion forum gives us a taste. I figure the poster knows better than I.

September 22, 2003; Style Special issue. You've gotta love art.

For sheer joy in materials, no on can compete with Sarah Sze. Binder clips, bright-blue Windex bottles, fake grass, PVC pipe, drinking straws, orange string — put it all together in the Whitney's moatlike sunken courtyard and you've got "The Triple Point of Water." This refers to the solid, liquid, and gaseous states of H2O, and it's an ethereal title, but the elaborate installation is a marvel, a delicate, multilevel habitat, a miniature city or ecosystem animated by little fans and burbling aquariums. Throught Oct. 9.

And more art!

Skeptics who think artists just want to have a laugh at the expense of impressionable viewers may want to steer clear of the Art Guys. Past projects include a giant sneezing nose (complete with nasal effluvium) and a shelf lined with ninety-nine bottles of beer. In this overcrowded sendup of technology, the Houston-based duo is at its best when sticking to schtick — the "Squirting TV Gag" gives unsuspecting viewers a spritz as they pause before a monitor.

But enough of art. What if you like books better? What if you write a book about consumer preferences and then find Candace "Sex and the City" Bushnell has just written a book with the same title?

Unlike Bushnell's confection, which deliberately invites comparisons to "The House of Mirth" (her leading man is named after that novel's hero), Silverstein's nonfiction work, which bears the subtitle "The New American Luxury," is more Wharton School than Wharton, Edith.

Read on.

Or go shopping. With Adam Gopnik. He offers "Under One Roof," the story of "the death and life of the New York department store." I'm fascinated with departments stores and why they keep dying out from under me.

Thank God we still have nature. Parts of it at least, enough for people to make art from it. (Oh, art.) Andy Goldworthy is one such person. "There are pools dyed blood red with pigment rubbed from on-site iron-oxide rocks; translucent arches of ice destined to self-destruct in the winter sun; rocks smeared with peat to coal black; thrown clouds of sand or snow, photographed at the sprayed arc of their ascent; coronas of bracken stalks fastened with thorns and hung from trees; delicate strings of pale-green rush threaded about a mossy trunk."

The fiction piece confuses the heck out of me, but the Toastmasters International mention is priceless. Why have I dog-eared every page in this issue? Is the Style Special that suited for me?

The poem in the middle of the fiction piece, I really like. "North of Manhattan" reminds me of the tunnel section of It's Hard to be a Saint in the City. The poet talks about the poem here. I wish the poem were online, but it isn't. I am cutting the pages out to save.

The New Yorker is brought to you by the phrase "sotto voce." At least last week's issue is.

First we enjoy the front of the book — July 23-24 at 8:30: DJ Spooky presents "Rebirth of a Nation," a multimedia remix of D.W. Griffith's 1915 silent film, "Birth of a Nation." — and we regret the day is already the 25th.

On the facing page, the "Pop Notes" column focuses on the Hives and their current flog, Tyrannosaurus Hives. What the review imparts more than anything else is the band's ability to title. Along with the album's name, mentioned and unmentioned go: Abra Cadaver, Two-Timing Touch and Broken Bones, Walk Idiot Walk, No Pun Intended, A Little More for Little You, B is for Brutus, See Through Head, Diabolic Scheme, Missing Link, Love in Plaster, Dead Quote Olympics, and Antidote. Not included on the release is the song that recently disappointed Pitchfork, let down by the music's failure to live up to the title, Hives Are Law, You Are Crime.

The crime for me picks up on the next page, the third in a row to catch my attention, with pictures that show no law-breaking but inspire thoughts of much. Photo illustrations lay out two of the four new different plans for the High Line, the "1.45 miles of elevated railway that runs south from West Thirty-fourth Street … languishing in rusty disrepair since 1980." All four of the visions are available online, and all four make me miss Chicago. They also conjure up the chase scene from The French Connection, which was filmed elsewhere in New York but works for association's sake. The High Line, they plan to turn it into a park. A photo gallery shows the line now, on top more overgrown than rusty.

Also referencing, albeit weirdly, is the issue's first long piece. Eliza Griswold's "The Hiding Zone" (not online) begins as follows:

Khalid Wazir, who is thirty and wears his hair in a mini-pompadour, twirls the tip of his mustache when he's nervous. The habit was little in evidence when I first met him, two years ago, through his cousins, a family of generous Wazirs who had befriended me while I was reporting on the American military campaign in Afghanistan. In those days, Khalid occupied himself, when he felt like it, by selling satellite phones in the Pakistani frontier town of Peshawar, but he often spent his days stalking sandgrouse with his dogs Floppy and Scooby and complaining about the local Talibs, who refused to let women dance at family weddings.

Floppy and Scooby?

There's no explanation of the dogs' names, but who can blame the editors for enjoying their Coronas at mid-summer? If the cartoon editor wants to be blunt, weird and blunt, I say let the cartoon editor be.

One piece where the flip-flops do fit snuggly (no, not in the John Kerry profile) is "Nerd Camp," Burkhard Bilger's visit to Johns Hopkins' Center for Talent Youth summer program. After getting mailings about CTY as a kid, I'm now glad I never went. These kids talk about revising Freud's theories, and I still don't know bus hit me in NU's Intro to Psych. (Okay, so I do. An A-level class taught by a beautiful professor with a capacity for devious multiple choice equals trouble. But I digress.) Twelve-year-old Jesse Mirotznik does his best to explain the life to Bilger:

"I've tried to gear down my vocabulary," he said. "But I still get a hard time. Anti-intellectualism is really popular in Ameria." Before coming to the center, he'd spent two disastrous summers at a sports-oriented camp in Pennsylvania called Island Lake. "I hated it," he said. "It was not a stimulating environment. I took boxing, and I was very afraid." Back home, Mirotznik attends a private school that offers a strong academic program. I asked him what he would do if he had to go school with the kids from Island Lake. "I don't know," he said. "I would probably get more into sports and less into thinking." He paused. "Or maybe I would just be very, very unpopular."

Bilger's piece isn't online either, which maybe makes it unline; but the writer does sit for an interview with the site.

And then there's this, another cartoon that makes no sense to me. Ideas this time?