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.
Using serious modes and channels to critique writers like Franzen only legitimizes them as serious people to be debated. What better consolation than to shitpost?
“Next Year” can still be exciting to us because of how it occupies the material it’s made with, and what that kind of occupation might have to say about the way we read both poems and calendars.
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?
You’re a poet who’s been at it for a while: you’ve published ten or fifteen books over thirty or forty years, and you’ve won prizes. You’ve had critics call you an Influence. But not lately.
To draw the lines of contagion linking each term to the others in their reticulation+circulation, uncartesian grid, would offer something like the topography of Summer. A summer map.
The earth was not at all made to someday host plants, animals, or us. Life, in its tenacity, has just scratched out a little foothold. None of this is for us. Really: None of this is for anything at all.
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.
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.
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.
My senior year of college, I got skinny off raw food. Soaked almonds, sprouted buckwheat, cucumber soup. The first time...
The Shining lives in my consciousness like no other work of art.