May 2013
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Against cultural pessimism
What I did this morning. Look into the abyss. Only just discovered this quote by Lionel Trilling, via Vargas Llosa’s book on cultural decadence in our time (“Alles Boulevard”; Suhrkamp). Interesting how Vargas Llosa (in the German translation of the Spanish original) gets this quote by Trilling wrong. By misquoting as if the students (and not the Abyss) had said “How interesting”, which he then...
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April 2013
1 post
the purpose of everything
«…with these words, my dear child, I shall leave you to your meditations: you must honor those who work with you; because to work in the world is to fight bad spirits. To be princely means to be an eye to the world, which sees things through you; it means to speak for the people as if your tongue was made of a thousand tongues. It means making up similes so that your people understand a thing from...
March 2013
6 posts
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Bezos Loves Books...
…in fact, the Amazon CEO loves them so much that he has just bought Goodreads, a social media site for readers and writers with 16 millions followers. My response below (really more of a ramble) seems a tad confused even to me, the author, but these times are complicated. I sense a certain religious subtext but perhaps it can be forgiven because these times require special spirit and because...
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Arnie in Asheville
I don’t know how many times I have tried in vain to describe what I feel for this action hero, this Kennedy-and-California infiltrating Austrian poser how much I admire his bulging ego and his love for animals which is featured too little in the media that seem to focus on the bluest lapis lazuli ever seen on the hand of a manly man, of a terminator no, of The Terminator, The Eraser, the...
February 2013
2 posts
January 2013
3 posts
The Rat King
The man stopped reading. The girl looked at him: “Did you honestly think, daddy that this story would scare me? Don’t you know how old I am? Do you know anything about me? I read the last Harry Potter book when I was seven,” she said. “Well,” said her father, “truth be told your mother read it to you. And she gave the old Rowling a sanitizing makeover so that you wouldn’t be traumatized for the...
December 2012
1 post
How to start a novel
TF: Do you erect extensive outlines?
MS: I didn’t used to do this and the result was that I would create interesting characters galore and wonderful, arresting scenes and begin to dream of possible paths and plots and endings, but I would never finish. After months of bliss for writing I’d end up with a bundle of golden tangents but not with a story, not with a novel. Hence now I linger a lot...
October 2012
5 posts
The Imagination of Matter
All art is competition: to begin with there is the artist competing with her art’s own inner image. She imagined one thing and created another. Now the latter must be transformed into the former. She cannot win this battle against the infinitely, quick footed, invisible enemy: her own imagination. Still, this sweet contest is the original source of the human desire to create beauty.
As soon as...
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September 2012
5 posts
contraption
«When you first enter a madhouse as an inmate, your learn to fear the sounds: dreams rumble and rattle across the corridors. Giant birds kept in tiny cupboards shriek senselessly. Even the silence is loud when your mind has faltered and turned against itself. But soon, these sounds become your new world. So much so that you fear to ever leave it: when you are picked up by your family for the...
August 2012
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July 2012
27 posts
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