May 2011
14 posts
4 tags
The academy doth make scientific impersonators of...
To be certified as an academic literary critic, you need to believe, and be willing to assert, that Ezra Pound’s Cantos, a work twice the length of Paradise Lost, and which 99 percent of all serious students of literature find too difficult to read, actually forwards the cause of worldwide anti-Semitism. You need to tell your students that, despite what almost a century’s worth of...
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that the pulling in and thrusting out of his hand,...
To swimme upon his side. This kinde of swimming, though it be more laborious, yet is it swifter then any of the rest, for that lying upon one side, striking with your feete as when you swimme on your bellie, but that the pulling in and thrusting out of his hand, which then did onely keepe him up, do now helpe to put him forward: for onely the lower hand supporteth his bodie, and the upper hand...
No man's plenum, Mr. Quistgaard, is impervious to...
DEAR MR. QUISTGAARD:
Although you do not know me my name is Jane. I have seized your name from the telephone book in an attempt to enmesh you in my concerns. We suffer today I believe from a lack of connection with each other. That is common knowledge, so common in fact, that it may not even be true. It may be that we are overconnected, for all I know. However I am acting on the first...
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"her son was the worst writer..." Rivka Galchen on...
The one rumor about Aira’s personal life I had heard before meeting him was that his mother, if one went and met her in Coronel Pringles, would tell you that her son was the worst writer working in Argentina today, and that she, though unheralded, was the best. I hadn’t been able to verify whether she had even published anything. Aira said yes, his mother had written a novel, he...
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in which @alexcarnevale @thisrecording melts my...
To me, Anne seems the living embodiment of something that is in all of us; in Anne it was the entire thing. She could not live, was not able to survive, without chronicling her life, without remedying the errors she had met and explaining them, often to large audiences, in order to set them right. She is a reminder that while we can change, a part of us never does.
(wow, you’ve outdone...
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Elocution taught, stammering cured
“With the other sex, the charm of voice is a powerful means of persuasion and control. It gives to woman much of her influence — an influence depending on the mildness of her manner, and her soft and musical tones, displayed in the language of sympathy, entreaty, and of kind remonstrance. Her’s is the privilege and the duty to be at the side of the suffering invalid, in...
WORD: On Work, by Jim Krusoe →
“If we can’t catch every germ before it enters our bodies, then we’ll sure as hell get them once they’re stuck inside.” (Iceland, page 81. Read it!)
wordbrooklyn:
The other day I was talking with a guy in a bookstore who told me he took as much pleasure in my characters’ jobs as in the characters themselves. “They’re such losers,” he remarked happily. “I love...
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Spiritually a year of profound gloom and...
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Postal regulations have been changed so that you...
(shit camera phone photo from TOPPER) Postal regulations have been changed so that you may now mail books to soldiers overseas, without authorization or a written request. The only conditions are that the book must be sort scaled by first class mail and must not weigh more than 8 ox., wrapped. Hundreds of soldiers have written to POCKET BOOKS and told them how much they appreciate these small,...
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