2024-04-22 14:24
I re-read Women in Love a couple of years ago and thought, I’m
out of patience with Lawrence.Then…Then, visiting my in-law in Montpellier, I took a book from
their shelf: Lawren… Read More
Blog Directory > Arts & Entertainment Blogs > limitedinc arts-and-entertainment Blog >
2024-04-16 10:21
The Trajectory of the Republican party is a sad thing. It is now Trump's plaything. But did you know - kids out there - that one of the co-founders of the R party in 1854 was a certain… Read More
2024-04-15 08:20
“Speed knew, also, that as the constant dropping of water
will wear away the hardest stone, so will the constant repetition of news
propaganda and editorial comment, however silly, wea… Read More
2024-04-11 14:03
As every sentient human adult (and especially department secretaries) knows, intelligence doesn’t exclude stinkerhood. Many are the geniuses who are also stinkers.I think these r… Read More
2024-04-08 13:13
Since Jonathan Bennett recently died, I've returned to his excellent book, Events and their Names. Hence these little thoughts. Jonathan Bennett’s Events and their Names is… Read More
2024-04-05 11:40
It is easy to write “bang bang he’s dead.” The written – on a
scroll, a page, a screen – may be bloody, but it doesn’t bleed. The long train
of individual… Read More
2024-04-03 19:39
I read the news today oh yeah/
About a lucky man who made the grade.
Ah, Biden. Who knew that inside that old body
beat the heart of a huge, dangerous beast? But then again, all th… Read More
2024-04-01 14:29
Marx made the great leap towards what became Marxism in Cologne in 1842, when he became the editor of a newspaper there and did a few articles on a local controversy: the new legislative ru… Read More
2024-03-31 17:07
The Bidenists are sounding more and more like the Bushies of yore. Not just the immorality of the policy in the Middle East, but the absolute blindness to the possibility of blowback… Read More
2024-03-30 11:18
Another
day, another thousands of starving Gaza children, another vigorous social media
argument between the well nourished: would Trump be worse for the Palestinians
than Biden? Perhaps we… Read More
2024-03-29 09:11
Yesterday, I watched a very sparkly Biden official, who looked like he had just come from the Ken-at-High-School-UN box, answer questions from a very well fed looking journalist. The questio… Read More
2024-03-28 17:21
“If Lovecraft was an odd child,” his biographer L. Sprague de Camp writes, “his mother showed signs of becoming even odder. In fact, she gave evidence that Lovecraft’… Read More
2024-03-27 10:58
When Gareth Jones, a former secretary of David Lloyd George,
made a walking tour in Ukrainian agricultural districts in 1933, he wrote a
series of articles about the famine and the pitiable… Read More
2024-03-26 17:02
In the early nineteenth century, there was a great romantic
fashion for the “will” in the moral, or
ideological sphere. The will seemed like a way out of the dry materi… Read More
2024-03-25 13:53
In the tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the thieves from
the cave that Ali Baba steals from send a spy into the city to discover who the
robber was and where he lives. By a clever dev… Read More
2024-03-23 10:39
The whole discussion of whether Trump or Biden will be "worse for Palestinians", mounted by privileged Americans who have not lost their legs to a U.S. supplied bomb, or all of their c… Read More
2024-03-22 14:55
Another day, another headline on Al Jazeera - "Israel’s war on Gaza live: Overnight air attacks kill 11 in the enclave" and another NYT turning a blind eye, no headline whatsoeve… Read More
2024-03-20 07:53
I am generally hoping for a Democratic party victory in the House and Senate, but I am passing on voting for Biden. There are 31,000 corpses and counting that count against him. Whatev… Read More
2024-03-19 10:25
The “sell your novel tool-kit.” The “How to write
Irresistable Query Letters”. The “50 Successful Query Letters”.
The flourishing subgenre of advice boo… Read More
2024-03-18 21:04
In the Spring of 2019, the rightwing French journal, Commentaire, published a story about the philosopher, Alexandre Kojève, by Raymond Nart, a former officer with the DST, French Co… Read More
2024-03-17 18:09
1.
The black out man, the white out man
All the muses of the Company
Busy
Forgetting the nation’s memory
In our hidy holes, we eat the reports:
who was who and who was where… Read More
2024-03-13 10:21
Daniel Harris’s “The Romantic”, from 1999, made the surprising argument – or
rather, exhibited the surprising implication – that the Production Code, the
Catho… Read More
2024-03-12 10:31
There’s an
anecdote in Ellman’s biography of James Joyce that I really love, since it
shows Joyce to be a master Jesuit after all:
“… one day
he dined with Vanderpy… Read More
2024-03-11 10:25
In the deadpan of poetry
Like any other mutant in the American grain
“speakers do not mark prosodically punch lines or jab lines”
But let it all sink to the bottom.
Bottom&r&hell…Read More
2024-03-10 11:13
“We read in the Salut publique de Lyon: an English
photographer, M.s Warner, had the idea of reproducing on the collodion the eye
of an ox some hours after its death. Examining… Read More
2024-03-08 15:07
Social utility of fat cats: the
use and limits of wealth
We need to discuss the social function of rich
people. Besides the marginal entertainment and sports figures, and the rare
invento… Read More
2024-03-07 10:03
I had one of those discussions last night in which the word “wokeness”
wandered around like an uninvited guest at a birthday party. “Wokeness”, at this moment i… Read More
2024-03-04 07:51
Among the
chief ornaments of the romance of philosophy is the high place accorded to the
open, or to openness. Open the understanding or the mind or the eye, openness
as a stat… Read More
2024-03-01 09:55
The softfocus NYT coverage of the extermination of Gazans
continues. Israeli soldiers murdered at least a hundred starving Palestinians,
and this is the lede" "The deaths of scores of… Read More
2024-02-26 13:20
A few comments about the Mass murder in the Gaza and its
apologists.
1. 1. Gaza is about 3/4ths the
size of the Dallas metro area. Israel's apologists keep ha… Read More
2024-02-24 19:35
Historians in search of a method in the early twentieth century adopted
a motto first: Cicero’s “Ne quid falsi audeat, ne quid veri non audeat
historia”- which has been t… Read More
2024-02-22 11:14
“Come on pretty boyCan't you show
me nothing but surrender”
Economists call it the Ultimate Game. James Surowiecki gives
a good description of it:
“Take two pe… Read More
2024-02-21 22:53
Marianne Moore teaches Sunday SchoolProverbs 9Stolen waters are sweet, and as for bread eaten in secretWell, don’t eat it, children, it will spoil your appetite.Wisdom is a woman… Read More
2024-02-18 12:17
When
Charles Lamb, a scholarship boy at Christ’s Hospital, was fifteen, one of his
patrons, Thomas Coventry, had a discussion with a City merchant, Joseph Paice,
concerning the boy… Read More
2024-02-17 09:22
Surprising news from the states! Myself, I thought there
were only two gospels there - the gospel of hate and the gospel of prosperity.
And that Christianity had faded from the national fabr… Read More
2024-02-16 10:45
I'm in Montpellier - my second fave city in France - and I'm thinking this morning of Joseph Conrad. Joe, as I call him, had a bag lifted from him when he and the family were temporari… Read More
2024-02-15 18:39
In a conference on his friend, Villiers de l’isle-Adam, Mallarme speaks of “an
exceptional story at the extremity of which is a tomb.” This story, for Mallarme, is ty… Read More
2024-02-11 10:52
In Antoine Compagnon’s marvelous and encyclopedic Les Antimodernes (which rustles with excellent quotations – among its other virtues. For reasons I cannot fathom, it has n… Read More
2024-02-05 13:58
There is a certain kind of book that doesn’t have a genre label per se; it falls somewhere between the essay and the treatise; like the the essay, it concentrates on some line of… Read More
2024-02-04 15:45
Often, Ulysses is read as a
novel that has a myth driven plot. And it is true that the Odyssey provides the
framework within which Joyce does his magic. But I – who love and honor Ulys… Read More
2024-02-01 17:14
On July 11, 1980, there was a traffic accident, a collision, on the road in the hills above a Club Med in
Haiti. One of the involved persons, Emerson Douyon, was a criminologist and an… Read More
2024-01-31 11:25
Perfection is a flaw in poetry. Or, to put this another way, the perfect poem must be flawed – it must flow from some essential flaw in the process of thinking or expression, it must b… Read More
2024-01-30 08:21
Plutarch, in the life of Romulus, lists several different
stories about the founding of Rome. Each of the stories is a variant on the
strangeness of birth itself.
1. The first story i… Read More
2024-01-28 10:39
So the Force of Nature said, Dad, after Yoga, let’s go see Godzilla. He’d already explained that it was a special showing at the Rex. We’d been there before, when he was ni… Read More
2024-01-27 11:21
Claire poems
------ Karen Chamisso
1.
Claire
giving tremendous blank looks
All that
slut hauteur
Dior Red
Vinyl on her lips
Claire in
her bodycon bandage dress
15 year old
Claire… Read More
2024-01-25 12:05
When I was an adolescent, embedded in metro Atlanta, I
dreamed of Europe. The Europe I saw in movies. The Europe I read about in
books. The Europe I saw in paintings, or to be more spe… Read More
2024-01-22 13:24
In 1977, Renata Adler inaugurated a piece for the New York Review
of Books with two great, dire paragraphs that seem like banners for that
post-Watergate, post-Vietnam War decade:
“Wh… Read More
2024-01-20 11:13
« Savoir être superficiel par profondeur. » I
extract this maxim from Georges Salles “Le regard” – The look. The deep know how to be… Read More
2024-01-18 16:48
The Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact has been burned
into our intellectual history: here, at last, Stalin cast off the mask and Soviet
Communism was revealed as a reactionary force. It… Read More
2024-01-15 08:21
When I first started reading Emily Dickinson in
high school in the 1970s, she seemed to be either a tame poet, good for holiday
cards, or a morose poet of the kind satirized by Mark Twain in… Read More
2024-01-10 11:51
It was the late nineteenth century social philosopher Gabriel Tarde who
first suggested that the public and publics, which in earlier times were
defined for the most part by their haptic pro… Read More
2024-01-06 10:48
Poetry, sez those who
refuse to include the whole universe of the blues, rock, punk, emo, rap, dap,
and other music in the poetry genre, is no longer popular, or read, or used, or
cultural… Read More
2024-01-05 12:46
Everything converges in plagiarism. At least in the recent
news. Plagiarism, to my mind, always makes for comedy – in that respect, it is
like marriage, which traditionally falls… Read More
2024-01-03 15:29
According to Philippe Gasparini, the term autofiction
first popped up in 1977, used by Serge Doubrovsky to describe his novel, Fils:
« Autobiography ? No, that’s a privilege re… Read More
2024-01-02 17:59
Weldon Kees, the great poet – one of the “minors” who Ashbery made, by a magisterially shy stroke, his predecessors – was an art critic for the Nation, succeedi… Read More
2023-12-31 16:54
“Yama said: The good is one thing and the
pleasant another. These two, having different ends, bind a man. It is well with
him who chooses the good. He who chooses the pleasant misses t… Read More
2023-12-30 10:27
Recycling a piece from earlier this year.
As I have been reading the old school coming out of the
woodwork to sign tribunes in support of Depardieu and his woman-beating ways,
my mind drift… Read More
2023-12-28 12:12
Its very hard to find anything in Gogol,
right up to the meaning; Gogol somehow shrinks from your touch, wriggles away.
He hides, and when you finally find him it won’t be right, it… Read More
2023-12-22 18:05
Everything was majorShe made the decisionWrapped in the xray love blazerTo trouble the divisionBetween the kitchen and the lawn.The grass whispered under her feetSlanders older than the jew… Read More
2023-12-21 09:32
This year
– this shitty shitty year – opened in France on a hopeful note: it was the
150th anniversary of Colette. Everybody party!
So I
dutifully decided to buckle down to Cole… Read More
2023-12-19 13:03
Consider a person who had every reason to be happy but who
saw continually enacted before him tragedies full of disastrous events, and who
spent all his time in consideration of sad and piti… Read More
2023-12-17 13:14
Nabokov translated Lermontov’s A Hero of our Time in collaboration
with his son. It was the father, however, who wrote the preface. In it, he
remarked on the mechanisms that Lermonto… Read More
2023-12-17 13:13
Neoliberal culture and Ivy-ization have gone hand and hand in our Post Cold War World.How’s that for a hook? When I was a whippet, I went, as an undergrad, to Tulane, Emory, Centenary… Read More
2023-12-14 09:52
Martin Buber, more than most European philosophers, made a
substantial effort to think outside of the European tradition, at least as that
tradition had been codified by the early 20th centu… Read More
2023-12-09 10:38
1.
Free love is a phrase that is well and truly dead – dead of
mockery, dead of the emotional exploitation of which it became the instrument,
deniability raising the old ghost of guil… Read More
2023-12-06 07:23
Nous sommesimmortels – Alain Bashung
When Eric Auerbach enquires about the
notion of “figure” and its broader use in rhetoric and literature, he begins by
going back… Read More
2023-12-05 11:39
Ron Rosenbaum wrote a journalistically celebrated article
about James Angleton for Harpers. Angleton, in his exile, with his bourbons and
his cigs, hunkered down at the Navy Club and told a… Read More
2023-11-27 06:40
The French burg that I know best, after Paris, is Montpellier. Just as General Douglas McCarthur landed at Inchon on his way up the Korean peninsula…. Hmm, scratch that. Just as many… Read More
2023-11-24 16:30
“But the moon is not to be judged alone by the
quantity of light she sends us, but also by her influence on the earth. No
thinker can afford to overlook the influence of the moon any m… Read More
2023-11-20 09:30
I was
raised by white parents in the suburbs in the South in the 60s, when apartheid
was beginning to crack. These facts in the background – both the apartheid that
made enormo… Read More
2023-11-19 10:09
How many rainy days have I lived through in my life? I’d
guesstimate more than 2 thousand. Not days of perpetual cloudburst, which are
rare, but days of off and on drippiness, of… Read More
2023-11-17 21:04
When Derrida wrote Spectres of Marx in the 90s, triumphalist neoliberalism, succeeding the collapse of Communism in the West, was ready to treat Marx and Marxism as an intellectual fro… Read More
2023-11-13 08:50
A funny thing happened on the way to the
marriage crisis.
In the Reagan years, as Susan Faludi
explains in her book, Backlash, a study that seemed to show that college
educated women faced… Read More
2023-11-10 12:06
Of Borges’ 1935 book, The Universal History of Infamy, the
best things are: a, the title, and b., the preface, a glorious meditation on
the baroque which has had many repercussio… Read More
2023-11-08 13:08
Among the more curious phenomena of the Cold War liberal
era, nothing is curioser than the elevation of Albert Speer. I was looking
through the archive of the NYRB and came upon a review of… Read More
2023-11-05 10:39
I walked into the Blackwood bookstore in Cambridge with A.
and Adam. Adam was looking for a copy of Killers of the Flower Moon – at age
eleven, he has decided to expand his cinephilia… Read More
2023-10-28 10:31
Anthony, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1670-1713) was born
into a title that had been given to his grandfather, the first earl, who was
the giant of the family. The First Earl was one of th… Read More
2023-10-25 09:30
"Then” is the shape of time, or at least of time for birds, beasts, and bacteria, and for all the other monuments of DNA as well. In the world of nuclear particles, ‘then&r&hell…Read More
2023-10-24 17:22
The old myth of the man who becomes another man or woman,
who is translocated into some alien skin, muscle and sensory apparatus, is
familiar to us all. My feeling is that I am that ma… Read More
2023-10-20 08:04
Calvino begins his essay, Why read the Classics, by defining them in terms of a characteristic phrase: “I am re-reading x” The classics are haunted, as it were, by re-reading. We… Read More
2023-10-19 07:42
While doing her fieldwork among the Makassar, a people
living on the peninsula of Sulawesi,
Indonesia who are ‘renowned” for their seafaring and fishing skill, Birgit
Roett… Read More
2023-10-18 08:34
One of Borges’ sweetest traits is his fidelity to the
reading of his adolescence When a writer like Umberto Eco, who is a scholar of the
highest level as well… Read More
2023-10-15 14:39
When Josef K. was around twenty two, his last year at the
university, he discovered the existence of a secret society which counted certain
students and even professors among its adherents… Read More
2023-10-14 15:17
In the Wolfgang Promies edition of Lichtenberg’s Sudelbücher,
the beginning note in notebook A, which could be the beginning of this “book”,
such as it is, reads: &l&hellip…Read More
2023-10-10 09:25
- I direct your attention to inventory no. 16232, a giant wooden Kruzifixus, accused of Judeo-Bolshevism, from the atelier of one L.G. by way of a Museum in Stettin.- O. I am beginning with… Read More
2023-10-09 06:55
There is a passage in William James’ essay, The Moral
Philosopher – which, by the way, is an excellent analysis of that species we
now call the “pundit” or the opinio… Read More
2023-10-06 13:28
I have long liked Michael Lewis for one thing: the long essay he wrote after Hurricane Katrina about coming back to New Orleans. In that essay, he defended Nola from the foxification… Read More
2023-10-05 14:59
The vogue for Hamlet in the 1920s is, I think, of piece with the culture of the 1920s: the wounded modernity of it all, from the Jazz age drinkers in New York city speakeasies to the charact… Read More
2023-10-02 06:00
Philosophers are all rather proud of Aristotle’s
notion that philosophy begins in “wonder” – it seems such a superior birth, so
disinterested, so aristocratically out… Read More
2023-09-30 08:58
This is how Shaw, in the preface to Heartbreak House (1919),
summed up the ruling class in prewar England:“In short, power and culture were in separate compartments.
The ba… Read More
2023-09-27 09:33
There are essayists who, as Virigina Woolf puts it, relate
their “I” to the “rheumatism in your left shoulder”; and those who relate it to “the
immortality of t… Read More
2023-09-25 08:41
“As I went out one morning”to quote a song, I strolled
around the Marais until I came upon the Camper shoe store and “laboratory” on
Rue Debelleyme, and I started to… Read More
2023-09-22 16:01
Andy Kaufman did a funny stand-up routine back when he was
funny and, even, alive. He would come out and stand, shifting from one leg to
another, his eyes bright and idiotic, and in that f… Read More
2023-09-21 11:25
The temperature of the Golden Mean is 98.6 F.
Or is it 97.5F? Surveys
differ. The point, however, is that the warmth of my body and the warmth of
your body, when healthy, dips lower o… Read More
2023-09-19 18:52
The scope of covert action could include: (1) political advice
and counsel; (2) subsidies to an individual; (3) financial support and
“technical assistance” to political partie… Read More
2023-09-17 09:38
When I was a callow youth – or even, one might say, a stupid
one – I used to take great pleasure in making up prank tapes for my answering
machine. I made one which I considered… Read More
2023-09-09 16:35
Should a man with back pain read the Philosophical
Investigations?
I’m the man with back pain in this question. Last Saturday,
due to some untoward twist of my posture, I think &ndash&hell…Read More
2023-09-07 12:27
Unlike, say, happiness or sadness, despair doesn’t easily
select, among a repertoire of performances, those which express its substance –
or rather, its tone. The attraction, suc… Read More
2023-08-29 14:04
We were too late to
catch the 1:15 train to Avignon from Montpellier, so we went to eat lunch at Le
Faune, the pretentious restaurant attached to MOCO, the modern museum just up
the street f… Read More
2023-08-25 21:23
Age puts a hole in
your pocket. You reach in there and find out that, without you knowing it,
somewhere in the course of your days and wanderings, you’ve lost … well, all
kinds… Read More
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