July 2011
6 posts
“What of our view of humanity changes if, when parents achieve an “attunement...”
– H. Allen Orr
“I had wanted to marry her, but there isn’t any possession. No, no, wives...”
– Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
Note on irony
In case anyone saw Campus, something about Jonty de Wolfe, who sometimes says or does racist things:
Irony’s less complicated to feel than it is to think about; the ‘laugh at/with’ distinction can help us do that. One of its complicating properties is that even as any of a comedy’s characters can be ironic, the comedy can present any of them ironically. So say de Wolfe the...
Bits after Cioran
If it is true that, even to practise junior disciplines, you must make yourself a philosophical barbarian, it’s also true that the discipline of philosophy is more alert to its questions than equal to them.
*
To be aware, in others’ actions, of your own revolting vice – to sense that, prior to each act, is the canniness of a calculation – ’How will this seem to people?’,...
“Surely?”
– John Lanchester 