Literature
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Writers’ Rooms
Susan Sontag: Noam Chomsky:
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A bit more of this, a bit more of that
A little bit of art… Alan Moore is done with comic books. There were an awful lot of headlines saying ‘Comics Have Grown Up’. I tend to think that, no, comics hadn’t grown up. There were a few titles that were more adult than people were used to. But the majority of comics titles were pretty much the same as they’d ever been. It wasn’t comics growing up. I think it was more comics meeting the emotional age of the audience coming the other way.
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A bit of this, a bit of that
Keats’ unweaving – from Lamia … There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine — Unweave a rainbow… Marina Abramovic and Ulay at the MoMA (The Artist is Present – 2010) https://youtu.be/Sf8o1teJdXo Lost in translation: Molecular basis of reduced flower coloration
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Links 2022-10-06
The artist, Kim Jung Gi (김정기) has died. Here he is, drawing in front of a live audience. Svante Pääbo has won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. Review paper by Johannes Krause and Pääbo. New biography of Anthony Bourdain. Lion Feuchtwanger’s “The Oppermanns” newly reissued.
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Temporarily embarrassed millionaires
According to hellyesjohnsteinbeck “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” This is a misquote, and: “the remark is very likely a paraphrase from Steinbeck’s article “A Primer on the ’30s.” Esquire (June 1960), p. 85-93:” Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: ‘After the revolution even
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Rumpole and the Golden Thread
Notes on Kittle’s PhD thesis Chapter 4: The role of the British legal system in British sense of national identity – “the long history of British common law serves a specific ideological function. It helps to establish as a distinctly British trait the fair and reasonable treatment of those involved in legal proceedings, whether criminal or civil.” The story Rumpole and the Golden Thread set, very unusually, in Africa, in the fictitious country of Neranga. The story is inspired by events that happened in Zimbabwe and the trial of the seven accused Zapu dissidents. The British High Commissioner
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“The Return of Faraz Ali” by Aamina Ahmad
Another book added to the reading pile. New York Times review here.
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Lessons from McEwan
Ian McEwan’s new book, “Lessons,”is out. Looking forward to reading it. Also, on his publisher’s website is an “oral history” of Atonement.
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Salvador Elizondo *The Graphographer*
I write. I write that I am writing. Mentally I see myself writing that I am writing and I can also see myself seeing that I am writing. I remember writing and also seeing myself writing. And I see myself remembering that I see myself writing and I remember seeing myself remembering that I was writing and I write seeing myself write that I remember having seen myself write that I saw myself writing that I was writing and that was writing that I was writing that I was writing. I can also imagine myself writing that I had already
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Floating in an Artist’s World
I recently had a chance to re-read Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World, first published in 1986 and the book that really brought him notice (it won the Whitbread Prize). I initially read it when it was first published, and I think I was too dazzled by the existence of the book to fully appreciate its message. It was, after all, a novel by a British writer of Japanese descent, written in English and – most importantly – self-contained. By this, I mean that it was written from the perspective of a narrator who is very much a