– George Steiner, Grammars of Creation
PARASITE TRANSLATOR.
10. You may or may not remember HQ Trivia, the mobile quiz game promising cash prizes which momentarily seized the world’s attention in 2017. Well, it’s shutting down. The beloved ex-host, Scott Rogowsky, tweeted Saturday that the company was shut down due to “incompetence, arrogance, short-sightedness & sociopathic delusion.” For the record, I once won a daily HQ Trivia quiz, won a massive eight dollars, deleted the app and never played it again.
Need to Know
This reminds me of Kafka’s letter to Oskar Pollak: “Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.” (There is of course his more often quoted passage about the ‘axe for the frozen sea’.) Steiner’s paragraph above, and in expanded detail in his book, is as good a description of the spirit of extreme seriousness that ought accompany the splendour of reading.
Sometimes I like to conceive of time as like water flowing in a river that always flows in the same direction. I can dream myself onto the river bank, outside of time’s flow, watching the whole span of earthly time as its memorised sequence of events flows by.Recognition Month:
Bertrand Russell found prison life agreeable — plenty of time for reading and writing. The only problem was a guard shushing his alien laughter
We know only four boring people. The rest of our friends we find very interesting. However, most of the friends we find interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us the most boring. The few who are somewhere in the middle, with whom there is reciprocal interest, we distrust: at any moment, we feel, they may become too interesting for us, or we too interesting for them.
That is a Lydia Davis short story (yes, the whole thing) from her excellent book Samuel Johnson is Indignant.
‘Some authors know that they don’t know, yet they still have the feeling of knowing something which cannot be known, something which cannot be pronounced as meaning, but which perhaps despite everything can be said through literature.’
It’s not about good books and certainly not exquisitely written stories, or pacy plots, or believable characterisation. A decade ago I would’ve argued against this perspective. It’s that sense that even the writer of an enchanted text doesn’t quite know the depths she or he has scaled. We don’t have the language to really capture the quickening that occurs when a voice has broken through and communicated something below our conscious mind. The ineffable in all its glorious beauty.
American biotech company claims it developed a vaccine for COVID-19 in just 3 hours International Business Times
Making Sense Of Through Tiny Nuggets Of Narrative
Tropes actually help us all make sense of the world (so writers, calm down; even trying to go against tropes is a trope of its own). Take a famous narrative of the late 1990s and early 2000s: “How do you make sense of something sprawling like Harry Potter? You divide it into digestible pieces. The Chosen One goes to a Wizarding School and forms a Power Trio. He’s opposed by the Evil Overlord who is Only Mostly Dead. The books get Darker and Edgier leading up to a Final Battle and a widely mocked Distant Finale.” – Slate
SATURDAY’s GOOD READING AND LISTENING FOR THE WEEKEND
After the Berlin Wall fell, political theorists celebrated the triumph of Western-style liberal democracy. But the champagne corks may have popped prematurely, argues Ivan Krastev, author of the new book, The Light that Failed.
For Glaswegian Norman Swan, Odessa has been both a romantic and terrifying destination; members of his family were killed in pogroms there and others escaped. So what would he find when he goes back?
Redactable due to LPPWhat If The Tech Revolution Was Just An Illusion Of Progress?
Ross Douthat: “What if the feeling of acceleration is an illusion, conjured by our expectations of perpetual progress and exaggerated by the distorting filter of the internet? What if we — or at least we in the developed world, in America and Europe and the Pacific Rim — really inhabit an era in which repetition is more the norm than invention; in which stalemate rather than revolution stamps our politics; in which sclerosis afflicts public institutions and private life alike; in which new developments in science, new exploratory projects, consistently underdeliver?” –The New York Times
The biggest superannuation fairy tale: 'I need $1 million to retire'
In less than a minute, this Senegalese sand artist working on the island of Gorée creates a portrait by pouring sands of different colors over a wooden board with glue on it. The way that the painting emerges at the last second out of seeming disorder is a lovely shock, like a magic trick.
Amazing Senegalese Sand Painting
Meaning Is More Important Than Happiness (The Path To One Is The Other)
Given that psychological pain is so ubiquitous, we should focus less on what might make us happy, and more on achieving a sense of meaning, regardless of how we’re feeling. –Aeon
The Obama Portraits Have Become, In Essence, Pilgrimage Sites
“Stories of visitors praying or breaking down in tears before the portraits circulated on social media.” (Not unlike Jerusalem or Lourdes.) Says the director of the National Portrait Gallery in D.C., “It’s a form of what I call secular pilgrimage. Much like people go to Graceland or John Lennon’s grave — the response has that quality to it.” – Artnet
Where we find ourselves …Ross Douthat’s New Book Examines Our Cultural Disaffection as a Problem of Absence
We are, Douthat tells us, exhausted. We make the same movies, over and over (most involving Marvel superheroes or galaxies far, far away). Our young turn away from actual sex and toward the consolations of pornography: sex without human relationship, and therefore without consequence and contingency. We approach “politics the way [we] approach a first-person shooter game—as a kind of sport, a kick to the body chemistry, that doesn’t actually put anything in [our] relatively comfortable late-modern lives at risk.” As Walter Benjamin famously predicted as early as 1939, we aestheticize through alienation, and alienate through aestheticization: living our lives in second order.
Why Anonymous Is A Bestselling Author, And Why That’s A Problem
“For readers, the anonymous author holds a simple and compelling promise. Here is someone who – by concealing their identity – can reveal the complete and shocking truth. … [Yet] this is truth-telling predicated, after all, on a lie – perhaps the biggest lie possible, the denial of who you are. There is plenty of room for fiction to sneak in under the cover of the original fib.” – The Guardia