February 2012
12 posts
A good book is something special, something unforeseeable, and is made up not of the sum of all previous masterpieces but of something which the most thorough assimilation of every one of them would not enable one to discover, since it exists not in their sum but beyond it.
—Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove
What's the Matter with Kansas?
lareviewofbooks:
Image © Paul Bausch onfocus.com
Ben Lerner and Cyrus Console grew up together in Topeka, Kansas, and became poets. Here the two friends discuss their boyhood bedsheets, corn and irony, fundamentalism and pharmaceuticals, how they came to use words like “metonymic,” “horizontality,” and “syntagmatic,” and why they are in the habit of renouncing poetry. — Tom Lutz BEN...
WatchYards Park!
I Shall Try To Fly By Those Nets
—The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.
—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
I think I just decided “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is the greatest line in literature.
“Loving was by no means as simple as nature would have us believe by bestowing on...”
– Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
The Greatest Show Possible: Better than The... →
thegreatestshowpossible:
I am in a fantasy baseball league. There is both an Eric and an Erikk in our league. They have never met. Shit got real today. Eric decided to jokingly make an enemy by sending the below email.
I’m taking immediate opportunity to call out Erikk as my team’s rival. His unconscionable spelling of the name obviously comes from some Nordic tradition, and as an...
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Who Is To Foretell The Flight Of A Word?
There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over treetops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities. What is to come? I know not.
—Virginia Woolf, The Waves