Attention Library: the phrase verges on redundancy. But unlike in most libraries, where the act of attention is a means to an end, in this Library attention is the main attraction: one visits the Milcom Room to attend, as it were, to attention itself. Is such an exercise possible?
And maybe that brings us to the myth of chronology: linear time equals progression. No. There is no linear progression and we’re reproducing subjection again and again.
They’re a potent reminder that we still live in the long, dark shadow of the twentieth century—the bargains made therein, the general Faustian demeanor accepted as a national character—and that a certain kind of serious, Modernist fiction still has a place and resonates.
Contrary to no one’s expectations, Emmanuel Carrère has written another book about himself. If you’re just being introduced, this is his fourth or fifth.
The impassioned disputations on taste and aesthetics at the now-maligned Salons were disputations on ethics, morals, and politics. As in our art world, taste was an advocacy vehicle for the Good, if hardly for the same Good.
