Word: austerity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Instead of the usual scholarly catalog, the museum has opted for a collection of texts, poems and stories by (mostly American) writers, ranging from Paul Auster to very early Norman Mailer, from Ann Lauterbach to William Kennedy. These suggest a parallel harmony to the paintings, not art history or criticism but analogies in writing. (Since, unlike most curators, the writers can write, one can read this vade mecum with pleasure after the show.) The idea is to show how pervasive the areas of American experience that Hopper raised have become. The show falls between two more formal Hopper events...
...PAUL AUSTER, 47, HAS won a cult following in the U.S. and occasional best- seller status in Europe by playing new tricks with established literary forms. He mixes some of the experimental whimsy of a Borges or a Calvino with the narrative drive that made old-fashioned stories so appealing in the first place. When he riffs on detective fiction, for example, as he does in the novels that constitute his New York Trilogy -- City of Glass (1985), Ghosts and The Locked Room (both 1986) -- he sees to it that readers craving mystery, as well as or instead of Postmodernist...
...eighth novel, Mr. Vertigo (Viking; 293 pages; $21.95), Auster again dips into the collective memory bank, offering a hero-narrator made up in part of Twain, Horatio Alger and the Dead End Kids. Walter Claireborne Rawley first appears as a nine-year-old St. Louis street urchin in 1924. Jaded beyond his years, with a side-of-the-mouth style of flip talk ("Well, shave my tonsils"), Walt recalls meeting the mysterious Master Yehudi, the man who would change his life: "We were standing in front of the Paradise Cafe, a slick downtown gin mill." "You're no better than...
Unfortunately, Walt's story is not over. By the time he gets to the part about owning a Chicago nightclub and advising an over-the-hill Dizzy Dean on career options, Auster's flamboyant inventiveness seems to be spinning its wheels. His clever parable about innocence and its loss comes down to a bumpy landing...
...sympathy. Doctors have long defended taking a cool, dispassionate approach to patient care, arguing that it helps preserve objective judgment and protect against burnout. But critics disagree. "By concentrating on symptoms and lab data, we ignore a wealth of information that can affect patients' well-being," observes Dr. Simon Auster at the Uniformed Services medical school. Moreover, he says, "it takes less energy to get close to a patient than to maintain a distance." Auster warns, however, that caring should not be confused with wallowing in soppy feelings with patients or adopting an appealing bedside manner. "That's superficial charm...