January 2012
66 posts
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“If style is the power to move freely in the length and breadth of linguistic...”
– Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus”
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"The Last Intellectual," by Susan Sontag | New... →
Okay so yes most examples of Benjaminiana are abominations produced by mediocrities. Susan Sontag’s brief essay on his life and work—slash meditation on melancholy—is one exception. Relevant to your interests if you’re Chris and/or curious about why some weirdo scholars get so weirdly fascinated with this dead weirdo.
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swamibooba replied to your quote: The conditions under which it was created were… Okay. I guess it’s time to tell you that I haven’t yet to read any Benjamin. But I will soon!
You should! Benjamin can be extraordinarily difficult, but, like most difficult authors, he rewards you in direct proportion to what you put into him.
Absolutely emphatically under no circumstances should you...
“He soon perceived, however, that the battles which Sir Miles and the rest had...”
– Virginia Woolf, Orlando (chapter 2)
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“The conditions under which it was created were extremely unhealthy: an unusual...”
– Walter Benjamin on À la Recherche du temps perdu, in “On the Image of Proust”
Protip
If, like me, you’re actually a little irrationally paranoid about Tumblr’s Missing E threats but don’t want to stop using Missing E, you don’t have to check their stupid box and assent to their ridiculousness. Just click “Uninstall” and “Done” and the warning goes away. It’ll come back after a little while, but you can keep doing that until...
December 2011
37 posts
“I feel like shit but I’ve never felt more alive. I’ve finally found...”
– Harper, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Part 2: Perestroika (Act V, Scene 2)
“AIDS has not destroyed the memory of gay existence, but it has made such...”
– Richard Dellamora, Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending (qtd. in Stanton B. Garner, Jr., “Angels in America: The Millennium and Postmodern Theory,” in Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America.)
“What you want to annihilate, you must not merely know. To complete the job, you...”
– Walter Benjamin
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Angels in America, Part 2: Perestroika—Act 3,...
ROY COHN: Let me ask you something, sir.
BELIZE: SIR?
ROY: What's it like? After?
BELIZE: After…?
ROY: This misery ends.
BELIZE: Hell or heaven? (Roy stares at Belize, as in "What a stupid question.") Like San Francisco.
ROY: A city. Good. I was worried … it'd be a garden. I hate that shit.
BELIZE: Mmmmm. Big city, overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up catty-corner to that. Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth, fierce gusts of gritty wind, and a gray high sky full of ravens.
ROY: Isaiah.
BELIZE: Prophet birds, Roy. Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian, and diamond-colored cowspit streamers in the wind. And voting booths.
ROY: And a dragon atop a golden horde.
BELIZE: And everyone in Balenciaga gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. (Roy laughs softly, delighted.) And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers. (Roy laughs again.) Race, taste, and history finally overcome. And you ain't there.
ROY: (Happily shaking his head "no" in agreement.) And Heaven?
BELIZE: That WAS Heaven, Roy.
ROY: The fuck it was.
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rolandfox replied to your link: Books of Daniel Absinthe Minded? Why were we not aware of this? BRB
I was never really happy with the way it came out—I think it’s sort of naïvely cynical and heartless—and I was churlishly even less happy with what the editors did to it. In fact, to that last point, you can download the original version as a PDF here if you really want to take a look.
Books of Daniel →
I decided to make myself a growed-up website! Not a lot there is new yet, but it contains links to my two booze essays, a short treatment of The Way We Were and a previously-unpublished essay on memory and minority, and a reading list. Soon it’ll have a more formal webblob, too.
I’ve also added a new e-mail address to my already-extensive list, and can now be reached at...
“There’s a time to go to the typewriter. It’s like a dog: the way a dog before it...”
– Edward Albee, in The Paris Review “The Art of Theater No. 4”
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“‘Fabulous’…. If you possess it, you don’t need to ask what it...”
– Tony Kushner, “Notes About Political Theater”, Kenyon Review 19 no. 3/4 (Summer–Autumn 1997): 30–1.
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indefensible replied to your post: Translations I have gotten joyboners over in the past year. Don’t they say translations are like lovers? If faithful, not beautiful; if beautiful, never faithful? Also, might be drunk.
★
All About Eve (1950)
Lloyd Richards: What makes you think either Miller or Sherwood would stand for the nonsense I take from you? You'd better stick to Beaumont and Fletcher! They've been dead for three hundred years!
Margo Channing: ALL playwrights should be dead for three hundred years!
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Twenty Paris Review Interviews for Kindle →
In the course of futzing around with my Kindle, Instapaper, and the Paris Review site tonight, I made—or rather Instapaper made me—a Kindle e-book with a simply wonderful collection of their famous interviews. The selection criteria were fairly idiosyncratic—which is to say that I just pulled authors whom I personally think are interesting, and left out many others, so don’t bray at me for...
WatchAAAAH! HE GOT ME AGAIN!
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“In his chapter on the fetish character of the commodity, Marx has shown how...”
– Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
“She was… (He touches the coffin) …not a person but a whole kind of person, the...”
– Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Part 1: Millennium Approaches
“Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his...”
– Karl Marx, The German Ideology
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fireland replied to your photo: WHY HELLO THERE DONALD GLOVER Watch the S2 bloopers to see his ass. Which does not disappoint DUH-DOY
This guy! Amirite?
The rest of you, for concealing this knowledge, are dead to me.
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Watch
“He also professed to have no regrets for a lifetime of heavy smoking and...”
– Christopher Hitchens’ obit. Probably a good quote to go out on. (via richardlawson)
“Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a...”
– Franz Kafka, Diaries, 19 October 1921
“Oh, let’s not jump to thing-doing!”
– Troy
“Before such people…, I begin to imagine that I am also a fake—that maybe all my...”
– Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931–1934