Category: Books
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The united nations of stupidity
I think this is less true in the era of memoir and blogging, but I will always prefer conscious foolishness to blind faith.
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The wages of immortality
From Wikipedia: “In 1998, the Modern Library named To the Lighthouse No. 15, on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century…The book outsold all Woolf’s previous novels, and the proceeds enabled the Woolfs to buy a cat.”
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Reading Gyula Krúdy
A bit of cross-blog pollination. A friend and I are doing periodic posts on things we happen to be reading. Here’s the latest, on Gyula Krúdy, a pre-WWII (and mostly pre-WWI) Hungarian writer sweet as summer berries, and deeper than he appears at first. Gyula Krúdy: Seduction and Innocence
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On being from somewhere, but writing from/of everywhere
Joseph O’Neill, as part of the Atlantic’s four-part Border Crossings collection of essays: There is a venerable tradition of being critical of nationalism and its assumptions. Nationalism proposes that a person’s freedom is justly maximized if the obligations limiting that freedom are set by the group with which he has most in common—i.e., his nation.…
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Blogging the National Book Award’s winners
This is like blog candy. Or no, not candy, more like a wine club, where something new and delectable comes in the mail whether you’ve remembered to look for it or not, and it might not be to your liking but it will always be worth tasting… Or something. In any case. The folks who…
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That poor girl
A brilliant encapsulation of Ireland’s rise to fortune, and subsequent, ongoing collapse, by novelist John Banville (who is a fascinating and lyrical writer, and well worth reading): IN the ravening years of the Celtic Tiger we had a dinner-party competition to define the figure most representative of the suddenly prosperous Ireland we so bafflingly found…
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RIP, DFW
David Foster Wallace apparently hung himself in his Los Angeles apartment this weekend. In his best book, Infinite Jest, he’d written with a horrifying clarity about depression, addiction and failure. In the context of a not-quite-science-fiction near-future, in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (the U.S. has started offering years for sponsorship), in which…
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Evolving economics
I know, I haven’t been blogging lately. I’ve been traveling, in the States for the first time since moving to Berlin (more on that later, but it was only in going back that I finally felt like an expat). Also reading, evolutionary theory and sociobiology. Which leads to this point. Reading this article on the…
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Steve Jobs thinks books are bunk
From an NYT blog, a Steve Jobs quote bashing Amazon’s (no longer new) e-book reader: “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed…
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The beginning of the end of hardback books?
The Guardian wrote this weekend about Picador’s plan to stop publishing most literary fiction initially in hardback form. That means even stellar writers like Delillo, Naipaul, Banville and Cormack McCarthy will be going straight to paperback. I read this with an initial twinge of irritation and sadness. I love hardback books, what reader or writer…
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Snow, time, and Soviet science fiction
Incredible how time sneaks by and I make excuses not to blog, like this is some chore or activity I might actually get paid for. Oh foolish reflexes… It’s snowing outside (or at least it was when I was originally writing this), thick flakes filling the air like it’s the middle of winter, although the…
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To the East pt. 1: Witkacy
We’re back from two weeks in Poland, Hungary, and Romania, of which more, including pictures, later. But first a bit about Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, or Witkacy, a Polish artist who dominated that portion of our trip. The son of an impossibly stern 19th century artist and critic with Nietzschean ideas of modern education, Witkacy was…
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Happy Bloomsday…
…even in Berlin. …O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar…
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The long view, in Afghanistan: Get out, while you can
Most everyone is familiar with how the Afghans kicked the Soviets out after years of bitter battle. I was less familiar with an earlier version of roughly the same story, almost 150 years earlier, when the British first decided to invade in order to put their own ruler on the throne, and forestall a largely…
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RIP Molly Ivins
A real loss to journalism and politics. There isn’t anyone in the US who can take her place, whose tongue is as sharp, but whose satire is made even more poignant by her real understanding of, and even sympathy for, the blemishes of democracy.