From an interesting dialogue between Pierre Bourdieu and G¸nter Grass [published as ‘The Progressive Restoration’ in New Left Review, 14, March-April 2002], some quotes.“Critiques of neoliberal policy are not equal to its effects.” [Bourdieu]“I never take part in talk-showsóthe form is hopeless, it yields nothing. Amidst all the blathering, the person who wins out is [...]
Hey, if this review can be trusted, Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me looks interesting. Better than Infinite Jest and Underworld, the reviewer contends. (I haven’t read The Corrections—something about that fucking Oprah Book Club logo on the cover keeps deterring me… even after reading the scandal that was whipped up after Franzen said Oprah was an illiterate [...]
At Cooks Hill Books and Records yesterday I stumbled across an original copy of the inaugural double-issue of Conjunctions. Only $5, too. It contains some beautiful writing, as it has ever since. Including a piece by David Antin, who writes brilliant philosophical stream-of-consciousness works; you can read two online: tuning, and the noise of time. [...]
I used to spend high-school nights reading the debates in the talk.origins newsgroup. So I’m always interested to read articles like these, which argue against the best proponents of Intelligent Design (a catch-all term for the leading theories that attempt to ground creationism in purely scientific terms, rather than appeal to authorities outside science). The God of [...]
As I post this entry and consider what to write I think to myself, just how many people out there read my rants, and from within them, just how many care about literary theory, and to those left, well, how ironic that I adopt a metafictional ironic stance within a complex sentence that attempts to map [...]
Driving home through the rain after talking about forever, thinking that the world is everything that is in the instant and minds are everything that are in the past and future, droplets swimming in the air and sliding down the windscreen, your mind floating on top of itself then sinking to track the red light [...]
“As if the soul’s fullness didn’t sometimes overflow into the emptiest of metaphors, for no one, ever, can give the exact measure of his needs, his apprehensions, or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when we want to move the stars [...]