February 2016

The title of this series is “Words Fail Me,” and this particular talk is called “Craftsmanship.” We must suppose, therefore, that the talker is meant to discuss the craft of words — the craftsmanship of the writer.

In a popular Woody Allen joke about a moose, Allen, playing a schlemiel from New York City, recalls how he went hunting and shot an animal in Upstate New York. After shooting the moose, he brought it back to the city.

How long can I keep wearing it? I found myself thinking, as the bus lurched into motion and cars honked around us. The rest of the day? Forever? I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me sooner to try wearing a head scarf—why nobody ever told me it was something...

A naturally occurring phenomenon in philosophy is that the key concept, the one whose weight is greatest and thus whose gravity is strongest—eidos in Plato, cogito in Descartes, Dasein in Heidegger—is all but untranslatable

In spite of its simplicity and methodical pragmatism, Charles Hatfield’s Limits of identity: Politics and Poetics in Latin America is an ambitious and systematic effort to dismantle some of the predominant variations of identarianism

Circus Girl Resting, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, 1924 From Los Angeles Review of Books: Here is a list of some major players in Cold War Modernists, Greg Barnhisel’s fascinating and meticulously researched history of modernist art and literature’s role in Cold War diplomacy: the American Artists Professional League (AAPL); the American Federation...

What seems to me chiefly remarkable in the popular conception of a Poet is its unlikeness to the truth. Misconception in this case has been flattered, I fear, by the poets themselves.

For most of the last century, newspapers were a licence to print money. Sports car-driving sales people boasted of turning down clients because the paper was too full; they couldn’t take another ad.

I’ve been waiting for years for Vladimir Sorokin’s second novel, Norma (The Norm), to appear in English translation. It wasn’t published in the author’s native Russia until 1994, a decade after Sorokin finished it, so perhaps there’s hope yet.

The words that the non-disabled use to talk about the disabled, or just the non-neurotypical, have not typically been known for nuance or tact.

At the City Hall, the two women, mother and daughter, were there to renew the latter’s passport. They got there at fifteen minutes to nine.

I never went to Greenham Common peace camp. I was a child during the main years - between 1981 and 1987. I don’t remember seeing any news coverage of the camp, especially compared to my vivid memories of reports on the miners’ strike.

If he hadn’t lived from 1749 to 1832, safely into the modern era and the age of print, but had instead flourished when Shakespeare did, there would certainly be scholars today theorizing that the life and work of half a dozen men had been combined under Goethe’s name.