Thursday, July 5, 2012
Imperfect Pitch
Hildebrand, an amateur flutist who got his undergraduate education on a music scholarship and later earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, goes by the nickname Andy and likes to be called “Dr. Andy,” in the manner of a self-help author or a pediatric dentist. In interviews he gives Auto-Tune a sagely public face, talking with non-critical affection for both music and technology, shrugging off ethical questions with folksy humor. “Well, I don’t know if it’s bad or good,” Hildebrand said in an interview with The Seattle Times. “I’m not a judge of that. It’s very popular, so in that sense it’s good. I don’t place value judgments on things like that.... Someone asked me at one point in time if I thought that Auto-Tune was evil. I said, ‘Well, my wife wears make-up. Is that evil?’ And yeah, in some circles that is evil. But in most circles, it’s not.”
To the extent that use is a measure of popularity, Hildebrand is correct about Auto-Tune. (Attitudes are a different kind of measure, of course, since users of things can have mixed feelings about the things they use.) Auto-Tune is a fixture in popular music today, employed far more widely than most people realize. There are no hard statistics to quantify the use of digital pitch correction; Antares declines to release its sales figures, and so does its main competitor, the German company Celemony, which calls its software Melodyne. In recording studios, pitch correction tends to be employed discreetly, if not surreptitiously, to preserve the reputation of singers. Each day, meanwhile, less and less pop recording takes place in the foam-padded studios of the old-paradigm record industry, and more and more is done in private, at home, with laptop software. Pitch-correction plug-ins are all but standard accessories for home recording, as the old lines between professionalism and amateurism, vocation and avocation, dissolve. The physics are simple: the lower the singers’ levels of skill, experience, or talent, the higher the value of Auto-Tune. The fact that one can or cannot sing no longer has much bearing on whether one will or will not sing. (...)
What does it mean to say that someone “can sing”?
My wife, the cabaret singer Karen Oberlin, is a third-generation musician. Her parents met at Tanglewood when they were playing in a youth orchestra under Leonard Bernstein. Her paternal grandparents were vaudeville performers who sang and played light classics and comedy songs on the Chautauqua circuit. Karen and I have a nine year-old son, and since he was in pre-school, his teachers have been telling us that the kid has musical talent. But what are they saying, exactly?
As I just suggested by relaying that family history, it is natural to think of musical ability as naturally ingrained, a gift—something endowed, if not by genetic inheritance, then by God. There is evidence of the inheritability of artistic talent in gene research, and there is a case for the divine in every concert review that describes a piece of music as transcendent or miraculous. Not that no one believes that creative skills (in music or any of the arts) cannot be learned, to some degree, or developed through training and experience. Without such a faith, where would the MFA industry be? Still, the Nietzschean conception of talent as a natural endowment—and more than that, a supernatural one—persists, only bolstered and gussied up now in DNA lingo.
This line of thinking underlies the widespread contempt for Auto-Tune as an extra-natural method of accomplishing what should supposedly come naturally, and it helps preserve our enduringly romantic conception of artists as special creatures, anointed or made differently than the rest of us. We resent Auto-Tune not so much because it is non-human—we put our faith (and, increasingly, our affection) in electronic devices every day—but more because the power it applies, in providing a way to sing in perfect intonation, seems superhuman and, in practice, indiscriminate. Auto-Tune defies the myth of the creative gift.
by David Hajdu, TNR | Read more:
Click Here for an Offbeat Experience
A new generation of travel-sharing Web sites matches travelers with knowledgeable locals for offbeat, authentic and mostly very economical experiences — across the globe or across town.
Witness, for example, Kieren Wuest, a business analyst from Sydney, Australia, who was in San Francisco not long ago for work. On his one morning off, Mr. Wuest, an amateur photographer, was looking for something slightly grittier than riding cable cars and shooting Victorian painted ladies. An Internet search led him to Vayable.com, where he found a $37 walking tour led by an author and artist who had spent 15 years documenting the city’s street art scene.
The guide, Russell Howze, is one of a growing number of artists, chefs, biologists, college students, authors, urban beekeepers, expats or hobbyists of one kind or another who are using travel-sharing platforms like CanaryHop, Gidsy, SideTour and Vayable to market their particular brand of expertise.
For the package-tour averse, this means a vastly expanded menu of opportunities. Want to take a private lesson with a Mongolian circus contortionist in Las Vegas? Learn about New York City’s garment district with a costume and wardrobe stylist? Fish a private bay off Qamea Island with Fijian royalty?
“Each experience is as unique as the person offering it and the person taking it,” said Jamie Wong, who co-founded Vayable last year. “It’s the way we all want to travel but haven’t been able to until now.”
These new services rely on free listings to fill out their catalogs. Some (SideTour, Vayable) put considerable effort into curating their offerings, vetting guides to be sure that they can deliver what they offer. Others (CanaryHop) leave it to peer reviews and the judgment of its users. Each handles online transactions between the parties, often charging travelers a small service fee and taking a 10 to 20 percent commission from guides on confirmed bookings.
Below, an overview of four travel-sharing services. (...)
Sample Experiences: Hookah and tea tour in Istanbul (three hours, $45); fly-fishing with the mayor of Kenai, Alaska (two days, $1,350; includes lodging and jet); dining with a Fijian king ($250 for up to six people). Also, a tour of East London street food ($48); a midnight street-food crawl in Queens (three hours, $48); a Harley-Davidson motorcycle tour of Versailles and Rambouillet (six hours, $310).
by David Page, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: André Letria
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
The Gospel of Consumption
Private cars were relatively scarce in 1919 and horse-drawn conveyances were still common. In residential districts, electric streetlights had not yet replaced many of the old gaslights. And within the home, electricity remained largely a luxury item for the wealthy.
Just ten years later things looked very different. Cars dominated the streets and most urban homes had electric lights, electric flat irons, and vacuum cleaners. In upper-middle-class houses, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, curling irons, percolators, heating pads, and popcorn poppers were becoming commonplace. And although the first commercial radio station didn’t begin broadcasting until 1920, the American public, with an adult population of about 122 million people, bought 4,438,000 radios in the year 1929 alone.
But despite the apparent tidal wave of new consumer goods and what appeared to be a healthy appetite for their consumption among the well-to-do, industrialists were worried. They feared that the frugal habits maintained by most American families would be difficult to break. Perhaps even more threatening was the fact that the industrial capacity for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than people’s sense that they needed them.
It was this latter concern that led Charles Kettering, director of General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.” He wasn’t suggesting that manufacturers produce shoddy products. Along with many of his corporate cohorts, he was defining a strategic shift for American industry—from fulfilling basic human needs to creating new ones.
In a 1927 interview with the magazine Nation’s Business, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that the New York Times called “need saturation.” Davis noted that “the textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months’ operation each year” and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year’s supply of footwear. The magazine went on to suggest, “It may be that the world’s needs ultimately will be produced by three days’ work a week.”
Business leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a society no longer centered on the production of goods. For them, the new “labor-saving” machinery presented not a vision of liberation but a threat to their position at the center of power. John E. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, typified their response when he declared: “I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance. The emphasis should be put on work—more work and better work.” “Nothing,” he claimed, “breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure.”
By the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called “the gospel of consumption”—the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn’t enough. President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: “By advertising and other promotional devices . . . a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up.” They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: “Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.”
Today “work and more work” is the accepted way of doing things. If anything, improvements to the labor-saving machinery since the 1920s have intensified the trend. Machines can save labor, but only if they go idle when we possess enough of what they can produce. In other words, the machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that as a society we have chosen not to take. Instead, we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labor, but “higher productivity”—and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce.
by Jeffery Kaplan, Orion Magazine | Read more:
Photograph: Brian Ulrich
The Audition
Mike Tetreault has spent an entire year preparing obsessively for this moment. He's put in 20-hour workdays, practiced endlessly, and shut down his personal life. Now the percussionist has 10 minutes to impress a Boston Symphony Orchestra selection committee. A single mistake and it's over. A flawless performance and he could join one of the world's most renowned orchestras.
It’s close to 5 o’clock on a late afternoon in January when Mike Tetreault, a tall, lanky redhead, turns off Massachusetts Avenue and enters Symphony Hall through a side door. He checks in with the security guard and then heads for the basement, wrestling with more than 150 pounds of gear (mallets, snare drums, tambourines) in a backpack and a roller bag. The rest of the instruments he’ll need tonight will be supplied by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He’s an hour and a half early.
The basement of Symphony Hall is nothing like the velvety opulence upstairs. It’s cold down here, with concrete walls and harsh fluorescent lights. As Tetreault signs in at a table and waits to get into a practice room, he notices the oversize instrument travel cases that are strewn everywhere, ready to safeguard harps and timpani during symphony tours. Tetreault, a Colorado-based percussionist, has already survived a nerve-wracking round of cuts to get this opportunity tonight to audition for one of two openings at the world-renowned BSO. He reads the list of the other contenders and is pleased to see a bunch of names he doesn’t know. Younger, he reassures himself. Less experienced. Hopefully that’s an advantage for him.
Tetreault has been working and practicing for this audition ever since Facebook, the online message boards, and the trade magazines began buzzing a year ago about two BSO spots opening up at the same time, one because of a retirement and one because a percussionist had been denied tenure, a polite way of saying he’d been shown the door. Tetreault knew all about this second opening, because the guy who’d gotten the ax was actually his former schoolmate. Now, in his friend’s misfortune, he saw the opportunity he’d been working for his entire career.
At 33, Tetreault was putting in 100-hour weeks on a patchwork of gigs he’d pieced together — simultaneously serving as the music director at the Galilee Baptist Church in Denver; teaching at the University of Colorado; and working various gigs with the Boulder Philharmonic, the Fort Collins Symphony, the Colorado Ballet, the Colorado Symphony, and Opera Colorado. Yes, he was doing what he loved for a living, but when he added it all up, it was barely a living at all. He’d made $55,000 the previous year, pretty good — until you factored in all the hours, and the fact that the salary had to support two since his wife, Rachel, had been laid off in 2010 from a communications job with the Colorado Symphony. The couple was living in a 625-square-foot one-bedroom apartment.
Waiting for his practice room in Symphony Hall, Tetreault reminds himself that if he can win a spot with the BSO, his very existence will be transformed. He’s aware of the challenges — the selection process is brutal, and even if he lands a job, there’s no guarantee he’ll keep it (as his former schoolmate learned). But the orchestra is a godsend for the very few who make it. The positions pay more than $100,000 a year. You get health benefits. You get vacation. You get to lead a normal life. Which is why the BSO is one of the handful of orchestras for which musicians the world over will drop everything to scramble for a job. Like Tetreault, they’ll practice endlessly for months, sacrificing family and personal time. They have to.
The classical audition ranks among the world’s toughest job interviews. Each applicant has 10 minutes at most to play in a way so memorable that he stands out among a lineup of other world-class musicians. Tetreault has prestigious degrees from the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music and the Royal Academy of Music in London, and he’s studied under the world-renowned performer Christopher Lamb, but at his audition, the only thing that will matter is how he performs in the most pressure-packed few minutes of his life. If he squeezes his glockenspiel mallet too hard, choking the sound, or if he overthinks the dotted rhythm or fails to adjust to the BSO’s oddly scaled xylophone bars and misses a few notes, the whole thing will be over. Mark Volpe, managing director of the Boston Symphony, sums up the audition process this way: “I want someone to be so brilliant that there’s no question.”
by Jennie Dorris, Boston Magazine | Read more:
Photo by Sean Hagwell
Thinking Outside The Bento Box
Get recipes for Spicy Tuna Stuffed Tomatoes, Salmon Musubi, Bright Pinwheels, Vegetables And Yogurt Dip and Syrian Egg Patties.
I'm sure you're a very good cook. But if you want to feel bad about yourself, spend five minutes cruising the Internet for photos of bento boxes.
They won't be hard to find. Originally just a convenient boxed lunch for Japanese field workers, bentos today can be high art, with flower-petal carrots, hard-boiled eggs shaped into bunnies, broccoli sculpted into trees. The moms who make them — because they're mostly moms, and not necessarily Japanese — are eager to share their edible masterpieces.
Confession: I have a problem with food that is cute. I even pick the buttons off gingerbread men. I'm also against expending that much effort just to coax my kid to eat. (Yes, my daughter thinks I'm "mean.") That said, I truly believe that we eat first with our eyes. And because of that, there is much to learn from the art of the bento.
Bento boxes go back to at least the 5th century A.D., when Japanese field workers, hunters and fishermen would pack dried rice into boxes. Somewhere around the 19th century, makunouchi, or "intermission," bentos emerged, packed with side dishes and treats for theatergoers to munch between acts. When the railroads arrived, ekiben — station boxes — filled with local specialties became popular. Today, many Japanese men and women carry bentos to work, and schoolchildren tote colorful arrangements of checkerboard-carved apples and rice balls shaped like Hello Kitty. Of course, these Japanese lunches will have Japanese food: rice balls (onigiri) stuffed with pickled apricot or baked cod roe, deep-fried pork cutlets, vegetables simmered in sweet soy sauce. But you don't have to cook Japanese food — or make cute cutouts — to reap the benefits of the bento.
Cookbook author and Japan expert Debra Samuels says the five main elements of a bento are color, texture, seasonality, presentation and nutrition (and let's not forget portion control — how much can you cram into those little compartments?). She says many Japanese believe that including five colors on your plate — red, yellow, green, white and black — means you have a balanced meal.
by Michele Kayal, NPR | Read more:
Photos: Debra G. Samuels and Michele Kayal
Nobody Knows You’re a Drone
"What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds."
— Steve Jobs
Forty years ago, in a hundred garages through-out the Silicon Valley, across the country and around the world, hobbyists pushed forward the state of the art of a technology developed by mega-contractors at great military expense. Steve Jobs’s techno-Utopianism evinced in the quote above is both clear and typical of the era. A million geeks worked with visions of beating high-tech swords into ploughshares, creating tools that would make life better and bring the world together. More subversively, computers and networks would restructure society, for the first time ever, in a truly meritocratic way. Decades before anyone had heard the phrase, “on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog,” the so-called hacker ethic, described in Steven Levy’s Hackers, dictated that criteria like age, degrees, race, position, or gender were irrelevant.
Such a benevolent role for computers represented a dramatic shift from the way they had been perceived previously. Just a few years before Jobs began tinkering with them, computers were seen as cold, calculating, a symbol so “odious” that the leaders of the Free Speech Movement on the steps of the university across the Bay encouraged students to throw their “bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus.” Students wore signs on their chest that co-opted the language of the punch cards so deeply intertwined with computers of the day: “Don’t bend, fold, spindle, or mutilate.”
Forty years later, we’ve seen a new wave of military technology take flight in the form of aerial vehicles — drones. Their rise has been anything but benevolent, turning into the military’s most relied upon and most lethal weapon. But in small circles of technology enthusiasts, these machines have captured the imagination in a way that’s reminiscent of the personal computer revolution, a fascination that doesn’t stem from their role as a weapons delivery system. As terrifying as the implications of armed and unmanned patrols overhead may be, remote destruction isn’t what holds the imagination.
Drones have not only destroyed thousands of lives, but delivered back real-time images of the destruction. As a domestic tool, drones aren’t the next development of projectiles or even aircraft, they are the latest stage in surveillance gathering and analysis, outfitted with a vehicle and sometimes a weapon. Understanding drones in this way welcomes another separation between the oncoming drone revolution and that of personal computers: If the PC is a bicycle for our minds, as Jobs said, what are unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), when liberated from the military and operated by the general public? Instead of increasing our understanding, they extend our senses. They extend our vision, giving us “eyes in the sky,” overhead or across the globe. Drones exist in a curiously intimate spot, that thin membrane between ourselves and the world, expanding and filtering what we may take in. More even than “thinking” technologies, “seeing” technologies become a part of us.
by Trevor Timm and Parker Higgins, The New Inquiry | Read more:
Image by Imp Kerr
Are Cycle Helmets Really Useful?
It is at first surprising to many people that the wearing of helmets
by cyclists is a controversial subject. However, cycling safety is a
much more complex issue than many people realise, where best evidence
and real-world experience sometimes conflict with received opinion. Key
considerations about risk when cycling, what influences cycling safety
and the inter-relationships between safety interventions, cycle use,
behaviour and health (both individual and public) are often poorly
understood. In particular, opinions as to whether cycle helmets are an
appropriate, proportionate or effective intervention are often dominated
by emotion and expressed with exaggeration, which can make it difficult
to know what to believe. (...) A little history
Cycle helmets have been around since 1975. They were originally a 'spin-off' product from the development of expanded polystyrene foams in motorcycle helmets, intended to supersede the old 'hair net' style of head gear then used in cycle sport. However, the protection offered by cycle helmets is very much less than that provided by motorcycle helmets due to the compromises in weight and ventilation necessary in order to make them acceptable for an activity such as cycling that involves much physical exertion. Indeed, because of changes to design in order to address concerns about comfort, modern helmets with soft shells are considered to offer less protection than some earlier designs with hard shells.
At first cycle helmets were promoted mainly by their manufacturers, with competing claims about their effectiveness. Then, during the 1980s, reports began to be published suggesting that if cyclists wore helmets they would be less likely to suffer head injury. From that time, the promotion of helmet wearing by cyclists has been a main thrust of road safety and health practitioners in many countries.
Attitudes to cycle helmets
The active promotion of helmet use by cyclists is a fiercely controversial and often emotional subject, with views put forward with great conviction both for helmets and sceptical of their value (very few people argue against the voluntary use of cycle helmets per se). Controversy is particularly acute with regard to mandatory helmet laws.
The arguments in favour of helmet use are invariably based upon the premise that in the event of a fall, a helmet might substantially reduce the incidence and severity of head injuries. A relatively small number of medical research papers are cited in support of this premise, most based on case-control studies. One 1989 paper is cited more often than any other, with its claim that helmets reduce head injuries by 85% and brain injuries by 88%. However, the methodology and findings of this paper have been widely criticised and there is no real-world evidence to support its predictions.
Proponents of helmet use include people from within the medical and road safety professions and also people who believe that a helmet has already saved them, or a relative or acquaintance, from serious injury.
Helmet-sceptic arguments are more varied. Originally based largely on issues associated with personal liberty, the balance of helmet-sceptic arguments changed during the 1990s as the health benefits of cycling became more acknowledged and as independent research started to be undertaken into the outcomes of rising helmet use and, in particular, the effects of cycle helmet laws.
Principal helmet-sceptic arguments are:
- The risk of serious head injury is small and frequently overstated. The promotion or mandation of cycle helmets is a disproportionate response to this risk.
- There is no real-world evidence that helmets have reduced the likelihood or severity of head injuries among whole populations of cyclists.
- Helmet promotion (and especially compulsion) reduces cycling and the health benefits of cycling. Less cycling increases risk for those who continue to cycle, whether they wear helmets or not.
- Much pro-helmet research and promotional material is flawed or one-sided.
- Insofar as there are risks associated with cycling as a form of transport, the greatest risks of serious injury come from inappropriate motor vehicle use and poor cycling behaviour. Institutionalising the idea that wearing a helmet is necessary for safe cycling diverts attention from more important actions to prevent crashes happening in the first place and results in victim-blaming when crashes do occur through no fault of the cyclist.
- Cyclists should not be singled out for helmets when head injuries to pedestrians and motorists are much more numerous.
In recent years many individuals and cycling organisations have swung from pro-helmet to helmet-sceptic as a result of experience with helmet laws and the growing breadth of evidence.
via: cyclehelmets.org
Image via: Metamorphostuff
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
Roberts Switched Views to Uphold Health Care Law
Chief Justice John Roberts initially sided with the Supreme Court's four conservative justices to strike down the heart of President Obama's health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, but later changed his position and formed an alliance with liberals to uphold the bulk of the law, according to two sources with specific knowledge of the deliberations.
Roberts then withstood a month-long, desperate campaign to bring him back to his original position, the sources said. Ironically, Justice Anthony Kennedy - believed by many conservatives to be the justice most likely to defect and vote for the law - led the effort to try to bring Roberts back to the fold.
"He was relentless," one source said of Kennedy's efforts. "He was very engaged in this."
But this time, Roberts held firm. And so the conservatives handed him their own message which, as one justice put it, essentially translated into, "You're on your own."
The conservatives refused to join any aspect of his opinion, including sections with which they agreed, such as his analysis imposing limits on Congress' power under the Commerce Clause, the sources said.
Instead, the four joined forces and crafted a highly unusual, unsigned joint dissent. They deliberately ignored Roberts' decision, the sources said, as if they were no longer even willing to engage with him in debate.
The inner-workings of the Supreme Court are almost impossible to penetrate. The court's private conferences, when the justices discuss cases and cast their initial votes, include only the nine members - no law clerks or secretaries are permitted. The justices are notoriously close-lipped, and their law clerks must agree to keep matters completely confidential.
But in this closely-watched case, word of Roberts' unusual shift has spread widely within the court, and is known among law clerks, chambers' aides and secretaries. It also has stirred the ire of the conservative justices, who believed Roberts was standing with them.
After the historic oral arguments in March, the two knowledgeable sources said, Roberts and the four conservatives were poised to strike down at least the individual mandate. There were other issues being argued - severability and the Medicaid extension - but the mandate was the ballgame.
It required individuals to buy insurance or pay a penalty. Congress had never before in the history of the nation ordered Americans to buy a product from a private company as part of its broad powers to regulate commerce. Opponents argued that the law exceeded Congress' power under the Constitution, and an Atlanta-based federal appeals court agreed.
The Atlanta-based federal appeals court said Congress didn't have that kind of expansive power, and it struck down the mandate as unconstitutional.
On this point - Congress' commerce power - Roberts agreed. In the court's private conference immediately after the arguments, he was aligned with the four conservatives to strike down the mandate.
Roberts was less clear on whether that also meant the rest of the law must fall, the source said. The other four conservatives believed that the mandate could not be lopped off from the rest of the law and that, since one key part was unconstitutional, the entire law must be struck down.
Because Roberts was the most senior justice in the majority to strike down the mandate, he got to choose which justice would write the court's historic decision. He kept it for himself.
by Jan Crawford, Face the Nation | Read more:
Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press
Andy Griffith (June,1926 – July,2012)
[ed. A scene from one of his greatest movies, A Face in the Crowd, directed by Elia Kazan. If you want to understand the genesis of present day "superstars" like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin there is no better tutorial.]
See also: Sheriff Who Gave Stature to Small-Town Smarts
Lost in Sighs
The History of the Nun, 1688
“I was but young,” said Katteriena, “about thirteen, and knew not what to call the new-known pleasure that I felt when even I looked upon the young Arnaldo; my heart would heave whenever he came in view, and my disordered breath came doubly from my bosom; a shivering seized me, and my face grew wan; my thought was at a stand, and sense itself for that short moment lost its faculties. But when he touched me, O, no hunted deer, tired with his flight and just secured in shades, pants with a nimbler motion than my heart! At first I thought the youth had had some magic art to make one faint and tremble at his touches, but he himself, when I accused his cruelty, told me he had no art but awful passion and vowed that when I touched him, he was so: so trembling, so surprised, so charmed, so pleased. When he was present, nothing could displease me, but when he parted from me, then ’twas rather a soft, silent grief that eased itself by sighing and by hoping that some kind moment would restore my joy. When he was absent, nothing could divert me, however I strove, however I toiled for mirth; no smile, no joy dwelt in my heart or eyes; I could not feign, so very well I loved, impatient in his absence, I would count the tedious parting hours and pass them off like useless visitants whom we wish were gone. These are the hours where life no business has—at least, a lover’s life. But, O, what minutes seemed the happy hours when on his eyes I gazed and he on mine, and half our conversation lost in sighs—sighs, the soft, moving language of a lover."
via: Lapham's Quarterly
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