May 2013
2 posts
“That’s the strangest legacy of all about Maggie: if you listen to those who...”
– Andrew O’Hagan
“When people who didn’t know about Isabel’s illness asked me what was new, and I...”
– Aleksandar Hemon
April 2013
6 posts
“Readers are after all the exclusive privilege of those who are brave and...”
– Keston Sutherland replies to Peter Riley
“No one, in the era when the bourgeoisie was proclaiming, with enormous...”
– WG Sebald
“Without ever deceiving himself about his medical condition, and without ever...”
– Seamus O’Mahony quotes Carol Blue’s ‘Afterword’ to Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality
“The academic study of literature has reached a slightly strange understanding of...”
– David Winters
“There is a way in which one cannot agree with Heidegger ‘on certain...”
– Terrence Malick, ‘Translator’s Introduction’ in Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons
March 2013
6 posts
“But a sense of the universal, an implied view of all activities from outside,...”
– Bernard Williams on The View from Nowhere
“There can be no doubt that he was, so far as he himself went, sincere enough in...”
– Perry Anderson on Gandhi
“A writer, particularly a young and inexperienced writer, feels himself under an...”
– Leo Shestov
“In not one of the hundreds of Aboriginal dialects and languages was there a word...”
– Wade Davis
“The decline of religion has only stiffened the hold of faith on the mind....”
– John Gray, The Silence of Animals
February 2013
1 post
“What contemporary writers, in my view, need to contend with, is the marginality...”
– Lars Iyer
January 2013
10 posts
“Among the methods that we see and that, if we identify with Maya, we must...”
– David Bromwich
“But MLA proves that nothing is sweeping the academy. The academy is already...”
– Alva Edwards on the MLA
“I love that mixture of fecklessness and gloom that certain comedians can project...”
– Geoffrey Hill in conversation with David Yezzi
“I was made aware of the odd mix of gain and loss when I went back to Atlanta to...”
– Garry Wills
“One lesson to take from Swartz’s death is that melancholic maladjustment is a...”
– David Auerbach
“The spectre of the creative writing industry, and its commodification of poetry,...”
– David Wheatley on 81 Austerities
“Many of the letters here would be neutral documents even if they hadn’t...”
– Adam Mars-Jones on Eliot’s correspondence
“I’d not really read much Kafka before and had grown up led to believe that it...”
– Aaron Swartz on The Trial
from 'I remember to have wept with a sense of the...
People who feel that lies make life intolerable, That it is madness to attempt living, since people are liars, Are like people who look at the handbook before the picture, Are like people who wish the words of a poem to have a single meaning, Are unable to feel safe unless they are irrelevantly informed. Lies are the discipline of knowing that people are not you. It is licentious not to...
“‘When we look at the image of our own future provided by the old we do not...”
– Teju Cole on Amour
December 2012
6 posts
“The present as experience is as we have seen indefinable and in this sense...”
– T. S. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in the philosophy of F. H. Bradley (emended at the suggestion of a note by Anne Bolgan)
“The idea, and its predication of reality, may exist previous to the articulation...”
– T. S. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in the philosophy of F. H. Bradley
“The published version of Hill’s lectures (when it appears) will not convey the...”
– Gabriel Roberts
“I have adopted throughout what seems to me the clearly correct Nietzschean...”
– from Brian Leiter’s ‘Nietzschean postscript’ to Why Tolerate Religion?
“Living in an attention economy means dealing with not only a scarcity of time to...”
– Rob Horning
November 2012
9 posts
“That the rest of the world, even the rest of the university community, seemed to...”
– Rob Horning
“Whatever else poetry may be, it is certainly a use of language that works with...”
– Eric Griffiths
“At moments it seems ‘good’ in the way that a child will be called ‘good’, when...”
– Barbara Everett on ‘To Autumn’
'Die Lüge wird zur Weltordnung gemacht.'
Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne daß er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet.
Willa and Edwin Muir (1935): ‘Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.’
Idris Parry (1994): ‘Somebody must have made a false accusation against Josef K., for he was arrested one...
“A newborn baby needs to be mirrored by another human being in order to grasp...”
– Rachel Cusk
“Greenblatt’s unacknowledged striving to square the Epicurean circle is a moving...”
– Morgan Meis
“If this was a medicine, you’d have stopped giving placebo to the control group...”
– Daniel Davies on Keynesian theory
“when I arrived for our meeting at a swanky hotel near the Arc de Triomphe, I...”
– Peter Conrad meets Haneke
“And so you open Pandora’s box to find the seedy ingredients of British populism....”
– Andrew O’Hagan
October 2012
10 posts
“If Hill’s recent poetry constitutes a tragic elegy for intrinsic value – or, to...”
– Paul Batchelor
“I’m personally involved in the apocalypse… It’s interesting how your...”
– László Krasznahorkai (via @lexipenia)
Email on John Gray
This was originally a reply to an email from George Scialabba.
i
On Twitter Teju Cole said that he wrote because the world had a pessimism deficit. I replied: ‘Should the pessimist hope for a world in which there isn’t such a deficit?’
Indeed, the ‘what we are supposed to do with’ question is the essential question to put to Gray. If the Grayian vision were what,...
“We talk about the sun, the moon, the stars. What if these are nothing but...”
– Alejandra Pizarnik
“The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem....”
– Freeman Dyson quotes Wittgenstein. For John Leslie’s Doomsday argument, see Mark Greenberg
Three poems
Three of my poems have been published in the September issue of Boston journal Poetry Northeast.
They are an erotic sonnet, ‘And other sales’, a dirge, ‘Dirge. Lyric. Afterpiece’ and a jig, ‘Jig’.
“Hill told us that he once wrote to [Tony] Harrison saying that he was going to...”
– Henry King
“The texts in Illuminations—this maze of linguistic shifts and slippages—are...”
– Adam Thirlwell on Ashbery’s Rimbaud
“The absolutism of reality is its non-negotiability, the fact that the world, our...”
– David Auerbach on Hans Blumenberg
“A key philosophical difference may lie in one’s sense of whether growth solves...”
– Tom Murphy 