Just enjoyed watching Charlie Rose's appreciation of people who left us in 2009. There's lots to wonder at and admire here, but I think the pieces that impressed me most are the interviews with John Hope Franklin, Edward Kennedy, and Thomas Hoving. Especially in the Hoving I felt energy, passion, and engagement.
Now, when people ask what are you going to do next, I am tempted to co-opt Susan Stamberg's one-word answer when she left her anchor post at NPR: "Less." I am more tempted to say, simply, "We'll see." After 46 years of deadlines, it is time to take in some oxygen, to breathe and consider.
Ellen Goodman's piece as a regular columnist--thoughtful, challenging, hopeful. And not just for her, for all of us looking to the future.
New Year's means we have, at last, reached the end of cocktail party season. That means the end, too, of long conversations with almost-strangers. Some people may breathe a sigh of relief at that, but not Daniel Menaker. Guest host Ari Shapiro plies his skills with Menaker, author of A Good Talk, about the art and science of conversation.
Listening to Daniel Menaker talk about talking on Weekend Edition. His New Book, A Good Talk, is mostly geared to conversation, but it seems to me there's more than little application to more formal situations. I mean, how many times have you heard a speaker mention the talk he or she is about to give? Audio should be available at the NPR site in about three hours.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791) Austrian Composer and Musical Genius
“To talk well and eloquently is a very great art, but an equally great one is to know the right moment to stop.”
Remember that advice about making your point and stopping? Well, here's another reminder from an unexpected source. Referred on Twitter by @ZimmerJohn.
That’s one thing the new year always offers: a look back across the plains into the past before we move onward into the future. It is a holiday that insists upon our temporality and reminds us that time is, in fact, the strangest thing. No one ever sat you down, when you were young, and explained the workings of time the way the safe way to cross a street was explained. You just grew into it, into the way we trail the past behind us while the future comes rushing forward.
It also offers possibility. We’re all surging forward — some with more impetus than others. And now we have 2010 before us, a year that seemed unimaginable until we were right at its border.
The Times picks up the end-of-year theme I have been following all week. This peace is reflected in other places in today's paper--Time, the Infinite Storyteller, a long and interesting piece by Roberta Smith
So take refuge in art. There may be no better place — no place more stimulating or ultimately more comforting — to contemplate life’s forward motion than a large museum, especially the great time machine that is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met is closed today while most of us take a collective timeout for time, but — at least for now — there’s always tomorrow.
In a way it seems a trifle odd that artworks are such superb instruments of time travel. Time is not visual, after all, unlike space. And most works in museums are static, unchanging objects. And yet art is loaded and layered with different forms of time and complexly linked to the past and the present and even the future. The longer they exist the more onionlike and synaptic they become.
For starters, each has withstood the test of time — a portentous phrase, but really no small thing: each object at the Met has been built to last by someone, for some reason. It may have fallen out of favor or fashion and lain undisturbed in the earth (or some attic) for centuries. But it remained intact long enough to be rediscovered, cherished once more, and studied, preserved and passed down through the generations for more of the same.
Finally, there's a review of Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, an exhibition at the Rubin Museum of Art, that is a " juxtaposition of Western science and Eastern religion." Even newspaper photos of what's in the show look good; it must be awfully interesting.
