Clik here to view.
more on “genre” and why i can’t read it
A few lead-in infobits and then a continuation of an argument: 1) Bought Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones today after hearing yet another respected litblog voice vouch that he couldn’t put it down,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
impersonality and the individual
“Of the vaporization and centralization of the Ego. Everything depends upon that.” (Baudelaire, “My Heart Laid Bare”) Henri Lefebvre toward the end of the first volume of Critique of Everyday Life, in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
porn, fast-forwarding, modernism, new aesthetics
From a very smart Guardian piece by Jane Graham on the Saw series of ultrahorror films. In particular, this paragraph caught my eye: When pushed, Burg cites the importance of context in justifying the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
chance encounters
Think I just, whilst having my 30th cigarette of the day down below my office *, broke the back of the last and hardest part of my book-in-revision. In mind if not yet on paper. It’s an analysis of one...
View ArticleClik here to view.
the literary and misery
Pierre Bourdieu, in the opening section of his The Rules of Art that deals with Flaubert and Baudelaire, argues that the very category of the literary is born of the tormented working through of a true...
View ArticleClik here to view.
stein query
If you had to teach a seminar on Gertrude Stein, and the seminar was to be focused on “queerness” however construed, which text would you discuss? Filling in a bit of a glaring gap here, as it were....
View ArticleClik here to view.
modernism’s manifest destiny
From the description of Gabriel Josipovici’s forthcoming What Ever Happened to Modernism at the Yale University Press site: Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
robson on mccarthy on (implicitly) mcewan and the aimlessness of innovation
In his fine review of McCarthy’s C, Leo Robson refers to a review-cum-manifesto that McCarthy wrote recently in the LRB. I was absolutely sure that I’d written something on here about this, and in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
will self and ballard’s moderate modernism
Will Self has a piece in the Guardian about his relationship to modernism – and the fact that he intends to write in a more modernist, less reader-friendly form moving forward. Feels a bit like a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
eliot / auerbach
Very strange, and not at all sure what to do with this yet. Might just be a false echo… But as I’ve indicated on here before, I’ve long been fascinated by the final paragraph of Erich Auerbach’s...
View Article
