January 2012
30 posts
“If there is a problem with the novel, and I’m agreed with Shields that there is,...”
– Tim Parks/ NYRB
“One of the functions of a canon or a national tradition has been to provide a...”
– Tim Parks/ NYRB
“[David Mann] lives in a 450-square-foot studio apartment on the roof of a...”
– NYT/ magnificentruin
“Mitt’s poor showing on Saturday, and his potential weakness in Florida, reflects...”
– John Cassidy/ New Yorker
A rather disturbing finding.
“Tocqueville said that the overriding vice of the democratic age would turn out...”
– David Runciman/ LRB
“This is what Kafka, Beckett and Borges struggled with: how to escape the...”
– Gabriel Josipovici/ New Statesman
“[A]t the heart of the aesthetic imperative we recognize the moral imperative....”
– Sartre | What is Literature?
“[Literature] must appear truly in itself in its very marrow, as being shot...”
– Sartre | What is Literature?
“To the west of Straus Park, however, the slice of Riverside and 106th had...”
– André Aciman/ Shadow Cities | NYRB
“There’s a fairly simple reason for the embrace of radicalism on the right,...”
– Corey Robin/ The Conservative Mind | The Chronicle Review
“As Karl Mannheim argued, what distinguishes conservatism from traditionalism—the...”
– Corey Robin/ The Conservative Mind | The Chronicle Review
“The nationalists who represent the constitutive peoples want and expect national...”
– Aleksandar Hemon on education and ethnic identity in Bosnia-Herzegovina/ Guernica
“Every time I threw up in the past, I was entirely conscious of what I was doing....”
– Lorraine Berry/ On Hunger, Bulimia, and Want | Open Salon
“Just because all the King’s horses and all the King’s men...”
– Marshall McLuhan | Understanding Media
“The act of writing for theatre is always a subtraction. This is a central...”
– John Steppling/ LA Review of Books
“In 50 or 100 years, no one will know there is a difference,” between the...”
– The Battle for Bauhaus: How A Movement Failed to Protect Its Name | SPIEGEL
“While correlations help us track the relationship between independent...”
– Jonah Lehrer/ Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us | Wired
“That same uncertainty disturbs many physicists who are adjusting to the idea of...”
– Alan P. Lightman/ The accidental universe: Science’s crisis of faith | Harper’s
“Arendt could be said to have embraced a diasporic politics, centred not on a...”
– Judith Butler/ LRB
“Several years ago, I happened to be visiting my parents when a longtime friend...”
– Peter Leithart/ wesleyhill:
I’ve posted this before, and it’s still the best little anecdote I’ve found that captures what liturgy has meant for my Christian experience.
“My reading schedule is not at all a regular and placid ingestion of books....”
– Roland Barthes/ A Piece of Monologue
“The present is the cause of the past in a novel, and therefore memory is a play...”
– Carlos Fuentes/ Dalkey
“San Victor says [that] an individual who feels he is best, most comfortable, in...”
– Carlos Fuentes/ Dalkey
“The great contradiction of utopia is that it is a Janus-faced proposition. It...”
– Carlos Fuentes/ Dalkey
“A novelist with a minimum degree of control over his material searches them out...”
– Juan Gabriel Vasquez: Misunderstandings Surrounding Gabriel García Márquez/ Brick Magazine
“Between love and language I choose / love and language.”
– Sharon Olds/ Brick
“Huntsman, who was the Obama Administration’s first Ambassador to China, strikes...”
– Kelefa Sanneh/ New Yorker
Pithy.
“Still, there’s that faint glimmer of hope we feel when we sense, in other...”
– Teju Cole/ wesleyhill
“Here is where we are. Republicans established the very federal family-planning...”
– Jill Lepore/ New Yorker
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is...”
– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities/viafrank
December 2011
22 posts
“So as an alternative, at the margin (again, no burning of Tolstoy), just be a...”
– Tyler Cowen on stories/ transcribed at Less Wrong Discussion
Blue-Collar Brilliance: Questioning assumptions... →
Our culture—in Cartesian fashion—separates the body from the mind, so that, for example, we assume that the use of a tool does not involve abstraction. We reinforce this notion by defining intelligence solely on grades in school and numbers on IQ tests. And we employ social biases pertaining to a person’s place on the occupational ladder. The distinctions among blue, pink, and white collars...
“Intellectual: masculine noun, social and cultural category, emerged in Paris...”
– Bernard Henry-Lévy/ Context N°18
“It seems that only in environments with rigid, frozen values—political,...”
– Dubravka Ugresic/ The New Eastern European Intellectual: “A Culture of Lies” | Context N°18
“And this one from a writer of fiction and other stuff: “Nicest? No qualifiers?...”
– John Cassidy: “What Is the Nicest Thing You Can Think of to Say About Newt Gingrich?”/ The New Yorker
“It’s been said—and I’m not sure I agree with this, but it’s an...”
– William Deresiewicz/ The Chronicle Review
“But, then, the magazine has never been without its critics. Robert Warshow, in...”
– There at the New Yorker | The Weekly Standard
“[F]or Trilling reading was everything. The literary life was not only an...”
– William Giraldi on Adam Kirsch’s Why Trilling Matters/ The Daily Beast
“02:11:43 (Captain) What the hell are you doing?
02:11:45 (Bonin) We’ve...”
– What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 | Popular Mechanics
“[T]he quest for knowledge needs no justification except the energy and...”
– Michael Wood/ LRB
This.
“One recent development in the debate around genres is an increasing discussion...”
– A life in writing: China Miéville | Books | The Guardian
“Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if...”
– T.S. Eliot/ mwfrost/christmasgorilla
Future Asian City →
an ideal already no longer even possible?
“Q: Tell us about three things you want to change in Singapore.
A: The mentality...”
– Terry Lee/ interview: FIVEFOOTWAY | Instant Asia 3
“Civilization is a spiritual labor, an openness to revelation, a venture of...”
– David Hart/ New Criterion/ via mwfrost
“Sociologist Michel Foucault correctly surmised that the Panopitcon represented...”
– Timothy Stanley, via dm/mwfrost
“Asked on one occasion about the meaning of one of his works, Skvorecky replied...”
– Paris Review - The Art of Fiction
Upheaval at the New York Public Library →
The Nation
Lundquist, who has since left the NYPL, is blunt: ’Our division has been dissolved. Our reading rooms have been closed. Our librarians have been reassigned…. In theory we continue as collections, the Asian and the Baltic, but I’m highly skeptical…. The whole library has been drastically downsized.’
“I don’t believe that the production and consumption of things can be the...”
– Octavio Paz/ Paris Review - The Art of Poetry No. 42
“Everything in the culture argues against the novel, particularly the novel that...”
– Don DeLillo/Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 135