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(T)werkin’ for the Weekend
In her book Working Girl: Selling Art and Selling Sex, Sophia Giovannitti writes: Of course, I can do wage labor, and I have, and I do. I have held many jobs; many are fine. But fine is not how life should be. I firmly believe that no one should have to work to live, that Continue reading
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Rectitude vs. the Commonwealth
Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (pp.104-105):“The memory of Antonius has suffered damage multiple and irreparable. The policy which he adopted in the East and his association with the Queen of Egypt were vulnerable to the moral and patriotic propaganda of his rival. Most of that will be cooly discounted. From the influence of Cicero it Continue reading
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Vanity (Book)fair
Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby y compañía (p.26):“The entirety of Walser’s work, including his ambiguous silence of twenty years, served as a commentary on the vanity of every enterprise, and even the vanity of life itself.” Todo la obra de Walser, incluido su ambiguo silencio de veintiocho años, comenta la vanidad de toda empresa, la vanidad de Continue reading
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Smash the Sets!!!
Whether you view him as a crank or a prophet, you have likely seen Marshall McLuhan cited ad nauseam in discussions of media and its effects on the mind. I was particularly taken with this set of quotes: McLuhan once said to his friend and colleague Tom Langan, while watching television, “Do you really want Continue reading
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The Nightmare of the Past
Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte (part 1): The tradition of all dead generations rests like a nightmare on the minds of the living. Die Tradition aller toten Geschlechter lastet wie ein Alp auf demGehirne der Lebenden. James Joyce, Ulysses (1.1):History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. Continue reading
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Like Old Man Like Yells At Sky
In my more peevish moods, I give vent to my spleen. Years ago, I found that I could no longer listen to NPR for a simple reason: too many of the hosts sounded too inarticulate to be taken seriously as representatives of an organization belonging broadly to the intellectual logosphere of our country. As much Continue reading
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The Eyes Have It
In his Confessions, Augustine explores how visual metaphors tend to be applied regardless of the sense properly involved in a given perception, though this relation is not typically reversed. Though some of his Latin examples don’t map on to English idiom perfectly, it is nevertheless interesting to observe that roughly the same relation holds for Continue reading
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The Ivory Tower Gets a Trust Fund
At the beginning of his Vocation Lectures (issued by NYRB as Charisma and Disenchantment, Max Weber explains that under the German university system of the late 19th century, only the rich could realistically pursue academic careers. At the time, junior scholars with only one published book to their name rented out their services in a Continue reading
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Ennius on Literary Celebrity
Nemo me lacrimis decoret, nec funera fletufaxit. Cur? Volito docta per ora virum. Let no one honor me with their tears or perform my funeral rites with weeping. Why? I flit about through the mouths of learned men. [Ennius, Fragment, cited in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations 1.117] Continue reading
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Logical Phallusy: On the Silliness of ‘Male Reader’ Discourse
Opinion pieces and reporting about the decline in male readership are afflicted at the outset by a basic epistemological hang-up: how would we even assess this? Neither survey data nor shopping analytics seem scientifically sound, given that they will be skewed by some form of selection bias. In the case of surveys, both the distribution Continue reading
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