December 2014
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December 2014 Highlights
Lauren Berlant performs by clicking
Today I introduced Facebook to someone older than me and had a long conversation about what the point of networking amongst “friends” is. The person was so skeptical because to her stranger and distance-shaped intimacies are diminished forms of real intimacy.
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December 2014 Highlights
Remembering Michael B. Katz
Michael B. Katz sadly passed away in August. We knew him as a brilliant writer and strong champion of the urban poor. Here are some tributes from his friends.
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December 2014 Highlights
David Beer: Broadcastwerk
Writing at sometime around 1930 or 1931, Walter Benjamin suggested that the voice on the radio is a like a visitor in the home, as such it is “assessed just as quickly and sharply” as any other houseguest.
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December 2014 Highlights
Michael Munro on Spinoza
Immanence is not philosophy, nor philosophy immanence. But there is in the passage from one to the other a modification of sense that is not without significance. It is perhaps for that reason that the two formulas are best read together. At the point of vertigo.
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December 2014 Highlights
Robyn Ferrell on Balthus
The pitfalls of identification, hero-worship, envy and malice can beset the most patient writer in the throes of five hundred-plus pages of attention to genius.
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December 2014 Highlights
Tinder Times by Bibi Deitz
I am in bed with a man. He has to go home. He is not staying the night. So he pulls out his iPhone and orders an Uber. It is ten o’clock. Joni Mitchell croons in the corner from my Macbook Air. Ubering while listening to Joni Mitchell, he says. Probably not what she had in mind.
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The Threat to Printed Books
One would like to be as cheerful as this about the future of the printed book, or even the book, but the analogy with newspapers, which each year continue to record further steep declines in sales, leading to the extinction of many venerable titles, does not give us great...
Read MoreIt’s Getting Ho Ho Hot
Oh, the weather outside is frightful, The heat wave brutal and spiteful. Our crops have no water to grow—Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!
Read MoreThomas Rath: Mexican Democracy
I don't think Iguala means we should jettison the narrative of democratization entirely, at least if we want to understand how and why Mexico has changed in the last fifty years. Elections are contested by more parties than they used to be, and the Supreme Court has recently shown...
Read MorePinsky on Hayden
Poetry is not the same as mere eloquence or high language. That’s a truism. The stock modernist examples demonstrating it include William Carlos Williams’ “This is just to say.” In a related way, Marianne Moore clearly enjoys saying, in the first line of her “Poetry,” “there are things that...
Read MoreVincent W.J. van Gerven Oei: Albanian Poppies
Recently, historian Bernd Fischer claimed that in fact the last German left on December 4, which was in turn heavily contested by Paskal Milo, etcetera. Why the fact of the last German leaving ought to determine the symbolic date of national liberation is beyond me, but I'm sure it's...
Read MoreWoolf, it seems, was predisposed to find Ulysses undeserving of Eliot’s praise…
In February of 1922, just after James Joyce's Ulysses appeared, Virginia Woolf wrote to her sister Vanessa, who was then in Paris: “for Gods sake make friends with Joyce. I particularly want to know what he’s like.”
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The tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
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The thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
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I spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
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The tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read More
The thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read More
I spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
Read More