‘Past revolts take on a new dimension in my present, that of an immanent reality to be constructed immediately. The walks of the Luxembourg palace and the square of the Tour Saint-jacques still echo the shots and the cries of the suppressed Commune. […]
‘I wish I knew how to comfort her – I wish I knew whether she wanted him alive more than she wanted him to love her.’ […]
‘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 vast fissures of the mountain side. And then, letting her eyes slide imperceptibly above the pool and rest on that […]
‘The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the […]
‘No pious unity with bloodthirsty reaction, no suspension of political hostility, no phoney peace to create the interval in which they can ready whatever atrocities they think they can get away with. Keep your hate pure.’ […]
‘Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as […]
‘ “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 the H-bomb, urban blight, Thatcher and Reagan and Helmut Kohl, smack and coke and television (“drug of a nation…”), and […]
‘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 link. I follow metadata from one document to the next, choosing a word at random, looking for documents that have […]
‘Ours is a bleakly utilitarian era. Every act, it seems, must be overtly purposeful, its value measurable, or else we deem it dispensable, a waste of time. Between the demands of social media (and our constant sense of inadequacy in the face of […]
‘Love flooded in her like a spill of paint, blooming across her consciousness and through all her sensations, staining everything with its brilliant vermillion.’ […]
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 name might as well have been graven in stone. […]
‘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 at ease. Revelations will come articulating that the movement of time alchemises even the deepest suffering.’ […]
‘For me, filmmaking is not that complicated. If you make a film about Wang Xilin, that will let people know more about his experiences, his thoughts and what he is like now. All my works serve the particular people I am filming, so […]
‘It is / Something he could do when he was very young, // When he was a little foal a long time ago / And he could run fleetly on his long foal’s legs, / And almost he can remember this.’ […]
‘So what is Spear? Well, Hild, but with magic – Hild let off the leash, unbound by those pesky historical constraints – and set a hundred years earlier, in Wales rather than England. The setting is throughly Celtic-flavoured, and so is the language: […]
‘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 American century, but its unruly shadow. Dyer’s accompanying texts wear their erudition lightly. He makes ample and appreciative use of […]
‘I left Beijing in 1987, shortly before my books were banned there, but have returned continually. In 1989, I was on Tiananmen Square with the students, living in their makeshift tents and joining their jubilant singing of the Internationale. In the two decades […]
‘These are just questions. Please don’t care too much about them. As you move through this book, watch any feelings of guilt that come up. After all, guilt is scaled to individuals. But individuals are in no sense guilty for global warming. That’s […]
‘All good writing is honest in the sense that it says what the writer means; but Emerson did not see that one can write with phrases as well as with words. His sentences are made up of hard fragments each of which has […]
‘The addition of music from Schooly D, one of the originators of Gangster Rap, not only cemented a sense of immediacy but also strengthened the ties to inner-city black America. A far cry from the misty-eyed, segregated period pieces of the same year. […]
‘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 were only just starting to remember sunlight. “Katya Vasilievna!” […]
‘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 far as she remembered. […]
‘All this pertains to the concept of the “brightweb” I threw out half-seriously in that post about missing stairs. This hypothetical brightweb is bright not because it’s well-lit by corporate and government surveillance but because it’s curated by humans who care about […]
‘ “All of this. The houses, the decorations, this arrangement you have. The way you work like us, and pay for the data cables and repairs, and just…keep pushing on with existence and collect and collect like we might. Never understood why you would […]
‘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 generally be accepted as correct. But I shall be asked for my definition of “the innocent”. I will give it, […]
‘Canon is a tricky word. I am using the term lightly; I mean those works and writers who are widely recognized and repeatedly cited, which of course produces multiple and varied groupings depending on who you ask and for what purpose. Every such […]
‘I once asked some students how fast they could read, and one of them said she could cover 100 pages in an hour, so I decided to use Housekeeping to teach the students how to do slow reading. (Books written to be consumed […]
‘If Chandler is considered the poet of crime fiction and Hammett its great journalist, then Himes is the songwriter of the downtrodden. His stories sing with a fire and light that comes from a simmering sense of loss. A loss of respect, of […]
‘Seven years in the making, The Book of Love – long, but never boring – enacts a transformation of a different kind: It is our world that must expand to accommodate it, we who must evolve our understanding of what a fantasy novel […]
‘I love films that describe the world as a complex, mixed world, and that say to be cautious with all people who want to [segregate] it.’ […]
‘That peculiar mixture of excitement and fear, of melancholy and joy, of boredom and wonder, which I felt as a child standing beside the sea, is strangely analogous to the feeling I get on walking into a good library. Both offer the potential […]
‘And the other trick that happens in that Pete Davidson monologue is that, and Danya points this out in our conversation on Twitter, is the insidiousness of invoking his personal narrative and tragedy, right when he was a child, losing his father who […]
Part of Dana Levin’s ‘The Living Teaching’: ‘So all hail to me― / Os Gurges, Vortex Mouth, I gap my craw / and the bakeries of the cities fall, I / stomp the docks―spew out a bullet-stream’ […]
‘Leslie was a huge influence on my writing. […] He was very good at saying one or two quite precise things about my work in a way that allowed me to see the work from a new perspective and transform it, and I’ve […]
‘Structural violence always seems to create extremely lopsided structures of imagination. […] The victims of structural violence invariably end up spending a great deal of time imagining what it is like for those who benefit from it; the opposite rarely occurs.’ […]
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 was half a goat. The elements who did not go to chapel thought he was all Pan or all goat, […]
‘Lynch also frees the paranoia of noir from the straightjacket of narrative. One of the most unique and fascinating aspects of Lynch’s ’90s noirs is that rather than creating terror as in most horror films as a sort of engine to drive the […]
‘The shaft was the negative equivalent of a skyscraper, an absence driven into the ground rather than a presence raised above it. A small lift provided access to the lower levels. Austin Arnold adjusted his hard hat, labelled with a Crossrail logo, and […]
‘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 in the scoring box, his black-whiskered hands so close to mine, I had no fear of physical violence, only the […]
‘I still hadn’t taken my eyes off the zelkovas. They were rooted at the points of a triangle, but their branches overlapped, and the closer they got to the sky the harder it became to tell which of them belonged to which trunk. […]
‘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 a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the water-lilies, hanging suspended over nests of white […]
‘She knew the sun in heaven, blue-molten with his white fire edges, throwing off fire. And though he shone on all the world, when she lay unclothed he focussed on her. It was one of the wonders of the sun, he could shine […]
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. I hope it makes it uncomfortably clear that, in the eyes of the media and policymakers, one missing billionaire is […]
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 a smile, which spread from one corner of Claire's mouth to the other like an elastic band stretched taut against […]
‘For a split-second his pupils flare, and his nostrils, and he raises his chin as if roused by the scent of something, but then his gaze slips, eyes unfocussed as though the alcohol of the evening has just hit. The hall light blinks […]
‘Our memories from before do not add up. Some of us remember a wasteland, others recall green countryside and thriving towns. Ahktar remembers that he served as president of an obscure banana republic, and we were all taken here after he was deposed […]
‘My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, […]
I love the precision of the pauses in ‘Morning Song’, particularly the semicolon (the only one Plath uses in the poem) after ‘notes’. Beautiful. […]
‘Severed of flesh and earth, the dog’s soul remembered. It remembered wolf and jackal. Becoming rage and anger, it remembered death carried in saucer eyes and cunning carried in seven tails. It remembered howling the hunt while wearing clot red ears, and circling […]
‘But then I see how the limits of the city have changed. The furthest estates are shrouded in darkness where street lights should keep them aglow. And the houses there are not lit from the inside. There is no orange stream of warmth […]
‘Ani’s ears lifted, this time in surprise. Deep work was dangerous. She remembered the first time she had attempted it. She had become so attuned to the bird she was working on that her heart began to lose its rhythm and her metabolism […]
‘Miami Vice is above all a great film on the human condition in a time of flux. Everything progresses at top speed (the meetings, the love affairs, the reversals, the cars) but essentially nothing really moves forward. The general rumour of flux absorbs […]
‘Calls for accountability and transparency might sound technocratic and unambitious. But the right to an explanation of how an automated decision-making tool arrived at a particular outcome mitigates against the idea that such technology can be dismissed as magical rather than material.’ […]
‘Cigarette smouldering in hand he shambled into the lane, a coronet of smoke lingering in the air behind him, like an image of a wandering spirit… […]
‘When I criticize a system, they think I criticize them – and that is of course because they accept the system and identify themselves with it. All love and bliss! And they seem to have no idea that the affluence (which for them […]
‘I write crime novels, so yes, of course I think of myself as a crime writer; how could I not? I also write poetry, and think of myself as a poet. And as a literary writer. A musicologist. A biographer. My model’s more […]