Italy’s Midsummer Bescheerung by Vernon Lee
The cool shadow of the fig-trees in the yards, with the whiff of that queer smell, heavy with romance, of wine-saturated oak and crumbling plaster; I know with a little stab of joy that this is Italy...
Read MoreFriendship in Fiction
In philosophical treatments of friendship, it can often be elevated to the highest form of human relationships, even if its perfect form is rare...
Read MoreGeorge Orwell on bookshops
When I worked in a second-hand bookshop the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people...
Read MoreThomas Travisano on Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop explored Brazil extensively, making trips down the Amazon, traversing the tropical rainforest with Aldous Huxley...
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Across Poisoned Oceans
The pair fly to Japan where they discover the virtual world conjured via the internet does not reflect reality...
Read MoreTimelessnesses
Inside St Mary’s Church in Gdańsk stands a Clock of Everything. At fourteen metres, it was the tallest clock ever built when Hans Düringer completed it in 1470...
Read More‘Why was I making so many cups of tea?’
It couldn’t possibly be that I was actually missing the ebb and flow of office life, could it?
Read MoreJoe Linker on Keith Kopka
It's poetry where the Punk finds their way out of the mosh pit and into the solo business of writing poems to make sense of it all...
Read More(Parentheses are outward-looking); “quotation is inward-looking”
A parenthetical phrase (like this one) may refer to things outside of it, parts of the sentence it inhabits (say)...
Read MoreMore than Heavenly Bliss by Andre Gerard
Important as the soup is in To the Lighthouse it is never identified, never seen as “beautiful red soup” or “eternal” tomato soup...
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Douglas Penick on David Jones
At the time of the dooms in the third quarter of the Reaper’s Moon, in the island of Britain...
Read MoreBlank Page Theory
At first I wanted to write only at night. The great romantic writers I admired wrote mostly in the witching hours. Can you imagine Kafka lugging his laptop to Starbucks at seven in the morning?
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The YA serial came into its own in the 1980s…
If Christopher Pike’s YA novels were sold out at my local Crown Books, I was faced with the choice of either Sweet Valley High or The Baby-Sitters Club...
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Both Derrida and Ronell suggest that saying yes is “telephonic,” both in the sense that it resounds over a distance and therefore always is affected by distortion and delay, and that the telephone as technological apparatus not so much adds to these inherent obstructions as it stands model for them.
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I don’t even care about secrecy, usually, because the scenario of exposing what’s unjustly censored has always seemed overdramatic to me, a distraction: all communication amounts to a defense.
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Today I ran without music. When I run this way my head boils out, matter shooting everywhere like water on hot oil. Phrases reach me and mostly move away before I can trap and extend them into actual thoughts.
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Today I introduced Facebook to someone older than me and had a long conversation about what the point of networking amongst “friends” is. The person was so skeptical because to her stranger and distance-shaped intimacies are diminished forms of real intimacy.
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Most of the writing we do is actually a performance of stuckness. It is a record of where we got stuck on a question for long enough to do some research and write out the whole knot until the original passion and curiosity that made us want to try to say something about something got so detailed.
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Both Derrida and Ronell suggest that saying yes is “telephonic,” both in the sense that it resounds over a distance and therefore always is affected by distortion and delay, and that the telephone as technological apparatus not so much adds to these inherent obstructions as it stands model for them.
Read More
I don’t even care about secrecy, usually, because the scenario of exposing what’s unjustly censored has always seemed overdramatic to me, a distraction: all communication amounts to a defense.
Read More
Today I ran without music. When I run this way my head boils out, matter shooting everywhere like water on hot oil. Phrases reach me and mostly move away before I can trap and extend them into actual thoughts.
Read More
Today I introduced Facebook to someone older than me and had a long conversation about what the point of networking amongst “friends” is. The person was so skeptical because to her stranger and distance-shaped intimacies are diminished forms of real intimacy.
Read More
Most of the writing we do is actually a performance of stuckness. It is a record of where we got stuck on a question for long enough to do some research and write out the whole knot until the original passion and curiosity that made us want to try to say something about something got so detailed.
Read More