March 2010
67 posts
The Most Distressing Fact in English Literary...
James Shapiro sends us to Samuel Ireland, who records farmer Williams of Clopton House:
By God I wish you had arrived a little sooner. Why it isn’t a fortnight since I destroyed several baskets-full of of letters and papers; … as to Shakespeare, why there were many bundles with his name wrote upon them. Why it was in this very fireplace I made a roaring bonfire of them.
No! Fuck – no!...
“What kind of music do you like?” I asked, desperately. The pen scratched,...”
– Rian Malan
“For men of a certain age, the embrace of their own guilt becomes, with a quick,...”
– M. John Harrison
“here we have the head of the largest Diocese in America teaching his entire...”
– Taibbi: always fun
“if President Mitt Romney had proposed this bill, a substantial number among his...”
– Ezra Klein
my own mind
Adam Kirsch:
The very poem Hill disdains as toneless has helped him invent his own tone. Ricks quotes William Empson’s homage to Eliot—”I do not know for certain how much of my own mind he invented”—as a tacit rebuke to Hill, who could say the same thing.
Tony Judt quotes ‘one of Keynes’s greatest insights’:
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite...
“He recognizes that academic humanists, whatever their politics, are conservative...”
– Grafton paraphrasing Menand
“I wanted to force a conversation where there was a need for one; that is part of...”
– Sinead O’Connor
Flown twits
rejoin Tristram&c where I left em before finals: it all comes back; all over again why i felt it the best novel i’d read
Does the NYorker fret I’m going to read it ‘cooooooooooperate’? As in, To don a fez?
Who’s better at construing diacritics than at identifying prefixes without a helping hyphen?
First of three Coetzees left, Foe, attests to why I’m...
“It’s generally not understood that there’s been a progressively...”
– Selig Harrison
“We’re served this reasonably competent generic romance so well edited, so...”
– Colin Burrow
“The sense of urgency is so great that waiting for an elevator is typically...”
– Yves Smith
“but no one, it seems, owes gratitude to the horse.”
– Adam Kirsch [paywall]
“For conservatives, this framing of our future hits three of their G-spots: it...”
– Hari
“A chimpanzee’s intellect is a near-miracle, capable of incredible things,...”
– deBoer the mysterian
“Meanwhile, the precipitous fall from grace of President Obama, in large measure...”
– Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (advance copy)
“At Opryland, devout, abstemious Christians were breaking bread with followers of...”
– Jonathan Raban
“Arendt called Heidegger the philosopher of our exposure to history, “ein...”
– Lesley Chamberlain
“Those who most loudly proclaim themselves patriots are the first to demand that...”
– Monbiot (the weekly highlights)
“Boren has said that, after the briefing, he ‘wanted to take a bath.’”
– Jane Mayer
“let us not forget: for a president overwhelmingly elected just a year ago, with...”
– Lessig
“But that is the remarkable thing. We have finally been given the work to do.”
– Atul Gawande
“He looked up, cocked his head slightly, stared at me, and emitted a very, very...”
– jsf
“That’s where Thompson and these new wankers of the pluralist wedge fail —...”
– PZ Myers
Note on traits
If selection were for arches rather than for spandrels, then, all else being equal, there would be arches even if there weren’t spandrels. That’s so even on the assumption that, in all actual cases, selection of one is selection of the other. (156)
That’s from What Darwin Got Wrong, which I read last week. To a layman it’s an impressive book. The level of technical learning it demanded was such...
“Anyway I hope it doesn’t pick up where The Two Noble Kinsmen left off...”
– David Mitchell. Funny, the S bits overawed me
“We shouldn’t be sending soldiers into those valleys, we should be sending...”
– Matthew Hoh
“If you remain a Catholic, please, at the next mass you attend, when you recite...”
– Keith Ridgway
“what critics want is a pommel horse they can pirouette around, which will...”
– Raine
“Is it that, chemistry having discovered the nature of water, philosophy proposes...”
– Fodor
“Many if not most of the most compelling artistic visions are espousing somewhat...”
– Yglesias, touching directly on my dissertation
“‘Nor does it have meaning: One thing I always felt very strongly...”
– Tony Judt
“Ultimately, they speculated that perhaps it was something unique about the...”
– Greenwald
“Sally came to call it the ‘black hole with teeth.’”
– David Lipsky
“In the relatively simpler case of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, its...”
– Fodor & Piattelli-Palmarini
“I think of Natascha Kampusch, the Austrian girl held in a cellar for eight...”
– Hari
“That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable,...”
– Keynes on Ricardo
“But to keep them all, with their base pay and their bonuses and their pensions?...”
– Simon Johnson
“The past is not only prologue, the past is also present, and White Teeth often...”
– Ouch
“The funny thing about life, when you try and write fiction about it, is that...”
– Amis
“Some staffers say they have watched rehearsals, on internal monitors, in which...”
– Kurtz. Glenn Beck is an actor
“Nobody has yet been excommunicated for the rape and torture of children, but...”
– Hitch
“As a child I watched chalk downlands, where rare orchids and wild strawberries,...”
– best columnist around
“He has reconfigured things, or our perception of them, to such an extent that...”
– Geoff Dyer
“Palin, the former half-term Governor, current-nothing and future-even-less,...”
– Grayson
“It is as though those who go into the City and make millions are working for the...”
– Andrew Oswald
“I decline to perpetrate a tribal dichotomy between innovative and mainstream...”
– J Derbyshire
“The opening paragraph sums up the twin problem with this book; it’s lies,...”
– Julie Burchill. ‘Twin problem’? ‘[The problem] is lies’? A semicolon which has ‘it’s’ referring more naturally to ‘this book’?
“I think the world is marvellous from the point of view of philosophical...”
– McEwan 