‘Out on the pale criss-crossed sand, high-stepping, fringed, gauntleted, stalked some fantastic leviathan (she was still enlarging the pool), and slipped into the […]
‘The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order […]
‘No pious unity with bloodthirsty reaction, no suspension of political hostility, no phoney peace to create the interval in which they can ready […]
‘Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. […]
‘ “And if I don’t accept, Colonel,” said Carl Barks. “After all, I’m an old man now. I don’t have much time left.” […]
‘The music of the era was dark. Even the poppy tunes and the danceable numbers had dangerous vibes, blasphemous turns of phrase. Blame […]
‘I’ve long had a game that I play at the end of long days, when I can’t sleep for fear of dreaming. I […]
‘Ours is a bleakly utilitarian era. Every act, it seems, must be overtly purposeful, its value measurable, or else we deem it dispensable, […]
‘Love flooded in her like a spill of paint, blooming across her consciousness and through all her sensations, staining everything with its brilliant […]
This is Louise Glück’s ‘The Undertaking’: […]
‘Miss Vera Brown, she wrote on the blackboard, letter by letter in flawlessly oval Palmer method. Our teacher for the fifth grade. The […]
‘When I make a work I often take it to the very edge of its collapse and that's a very beautiful balance.’ […]
‘I leave behind heavy hearts. I wish I could dry the tears from their eyes. Absolute truth will eventually put their paining hearts […]
‘For me, filmmaking is not that complicated. If you make a film about Wang Xilin, that will let people know more about his […]
‘It is / Something he could do when he was very young, // When he was a little foal a long time ago […]
‘So what is Spear? Well, Hild, but with magic – Hild let off the leash, unbound by those pesky historical constraints – and […]
‘There’s a certain tenuousness to Winogrand’s photos; the compositions hold together, but just barely. He was conveying not the coherent myth of the […]
‘I left Beijing in 1987, shortly before my books were banned there, but have returned continually. In 1989, I was on Tiananmen Square […]
‘These are just questions. Please don’t care too much about them. As you move through this book, watch any feelings of guilt that […]
‘All good writing is honest in the sense that it says what the writer means; but Emerson did not see that one can […]
‘The addition of music from Schooly D, one of the originators of Gangster Rap, not only cemented a sense of immediacy but also […]
‘A gentle hiss filled his ears. […]
‘ “Katya!” A woman’s voice echoed from the house on the hill, muffled only slightly by the new spring leaves and soft mosses that […]
‘10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. […]
‘Usually the surveys came back safely, and no one was lost. Zivia told me there hadn’t been any losses for a while, as […]
‘All this pertains to the concept of the “brightweb” I threw out half-seriously in that post about missing stairs. This hypothetical brightweb […]
‘ “All of this. The houses, the decorations, this arrangement you have. The way you work like us, and pay for the data cables […]
‘5.1 Revolutionary Woman #3 – Code Name: Dolores […]
‘When I say that to choose to kill the innocent as a means to one's ends is murder, I am saying what would […]
‘Canon is a tricky word. I am using the term lightly; I mean those works and writers who are widely recognized and repeatedly […]
‘I once asked some students how fast they could read, and one of them said she could cover 100 pages in an hour, […]
‘If Chandler is considered the poet of crime fiction and Hammett its great journalist, then Himes is the songwriter of the downtrodden. His […]
‘Seven years in the making, The Book of Love – long, but never boring – enacts a transformation of a different kind: It […]
‘I love films that describe the world as a complex, mixed world, and that say to be cautious with all people who want […]
‘That peculiar mixture of excitement and fear, of melancholy and joy, of boredom and wonder, which I felt as a child standing beside […]
‘And the other trick that happens in that Pete Davidson monologue is that, and Danya points this out in our conversation on Twitter, […]
Part of Dana Levin’s ‘The Living Teaching’: ‘So all hail to me― / Os Gurges, Vortex Mouth, I gap my craw / and […]
‘Leslie was a huge influence on my writing. […] He was very good at saying one or two quite precise things about my […]
‘Structural violence always seems to create extremely lopsided structures of imagination. […] The victims of structural violence invariably end up spending a great […]
Everything that can be said has been said in the film; I won’t say any more. […]
‘Nobody liked him in the valley. The elements who went to chapel thought he was on a par with the god Pan, who […]
‘Lynch also frees the paranoia of noir from the straightjacket of narrative. One of the most unique and fascinating aspects of Lynch’s ’90s […]
‘The shaft was the negative equivalent of a skyscraper, an absence driven into the ground rather than a presence raised above it. A […]
‘Scorsese always tells them they have to start a certain place, and they have to end a certain place, but anything goes inbetween.’ […]
‘Crossley, a big man of forty or fifty,had a queer, not unpleasant face. But I felt a little uncomfortable, sitting next to him […]
‘I still hadn’t taken my eyes off the zelkovas. They were rooted at the points of a triangle, but their branches overlapped, and […]
‘A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which one could slice with one’s thought as […]
‘She knew the sun in heaven, blue-molten with his white fire edges, throwing off fire. And though he shone on all the world, […]
She’d been right, after all. He had been named after a star. […]
‘If anything good can come of these two tragedies, I hope it’s that it makes more people rethink how we value human lives. […]
This is James Fenton’s ‘Tiananmen’ […]
‘After a time, I no longer heard my words but only the sound of my voice, and saw only the faint trace of […]
‘For a split-second his pupils flare, and his nostrils, and he raises his chin as if roused by the scent of something, but […]
‘Our memories from before do not add up. Some of us remember a wasteland, others recall green countryside and thriving towns. Ahktar remembers […]
‘My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I […]
I love the precision of the pauses in ‘Morning Song’, particularly the semicolon (the only one Plath uses in the poem) after ‘notes’. […]
‘Severed of flesh and earth, the dog’s soul remembered. It remembered wolf and jackal. Becoming rage and anger, it remembered death carried in […]
‘But then I see how the limits of the city have changed. The furthest estates are shrouded in darkness where street lights should […]
‘Ani’s ears lifted, this time in surprise. Deep work was dangerous. She remembered the first time she had attempted it. She had become […]
‘Miami Vice is above all a great film on the human condition in a time of flux. Everything progresses at top speed (the […]
‘Calls for accountability and transparency might sound technocratic and unambitious. But the right to an explanation of how an automated decision-making tool arrived […]
‘Cigarette smouldering in hand he shambled into the lane, a coronet of smoke lingering in the air behind him, like an image of […]
‘When I criticize a system, they think I criticize them – and that is of course because they accept the system and identify […]
‘I write crime novels, so yes, of course I think of myself as a crime writer; how could I not? I also write […]