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on my bookshelf: A Universal History of Iniquity
As a new project, I’m going to be going from left to right, top to bottom (as does the autodidact in Sartre’s Nausea) through the books in my bookshelf and giving a short little review of them.
A Universal History of Iniquity is a collection of short clippings describing various crimes committed in and around the [...]
Review: Savage Detectives
Science fiction it keeps cropping up in my dilletantish adventures in reading. What do you make of realism in novels when the best examples seem to flout the carefully-established norms? The novels whose margins I write in most, the ones with the coffee stains from all that reading during breakfast—are the novels most likely to [...]
Also posted in art, criticism, philosophy Tagged borges, philip k. dick, Plato, reviews, roberto bolaño, savage detectives, spanish art Leave a comment
on the sheltering sky
The Millions, for better or for worse, is the de facto leader in online literary reviews. This is often for the worse, as their laziness confirms our worst suspicions about the quality of criticism / thought that the internet can possibly generate. Today’s review of Paul Bowle’s The Sheltering Sky, for example, is full of [...]
on images
On Photography, by Susan Sontag
In high school I was obsessed with the video game Counter-Strike. It’s an online team-based tactical first-person shooter. One team is designated “terrorist”, another “counter-terrorists”. Both teams pursue their a specific objective—for terrorists this might be preventing the counter-terrorists from rescuing hostages, bombing an objective, preventing the escape of a V.I.P. [...]
To Read, February 2009
This is a goal, not requirement.
Crime & Punishment
Course in General Linguistics
Portrait of a Lady
Pride & Prejudice
Paradise Lost
Life of Johnson
Mrs Dalloway
Our Man in Havana
Machine by Peter Adolphsen
The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard
A View from the Chuo Line by Donald Richie
After Babel by George Steiner
A Broom in the System by David Foster Wallace
Susan Sontag’s Journals and Notebooks
The [...]
sunday reading
D.T. Max writes the first decent and comprehensive retrospective on the life of David Foster Wallace for next week’s New Yorker. I’m slowly coming to the realization that DFW’s work and death will come to be seen as the heartbreak of my generation.
We can all use a little Bosch and French poetry to get us [...]
the day’s reading
Today’s reading:
Popmatters reviews “Stuff White People Like”
The Economist on Financial Globalization’s Death Knells
The Weekly Standard on the new “Killjoy” political economy
The American on India’s Railway Czar Lalu Yadev
Thierry Chervel believes the islamisation of Europe is a foregone conclusion
Some of these may show up with this week’s review, but most likely not.
Posted in reading Tagged economist, europe, globalization, india, islamisation, killjoy, popmatters, stuff white people like, the american, thierry chervel, weekly standard Leave a comment
Sunday Reading
“Such, Such was Eric Blair,” by Julian Barnes in the NY Review of Books
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Communitarianism
Italian Documentary on Brian Eno on ArtSpace.it
Economist on the Oscars (they afford themselves a little populism when it comes to culture)
The American Conservative on British Inspiration (or its lack thereof)
The Random Beauty of Facebook’s “25 things [...]
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