More specifically concerning: essays
The Gutenberg Elegies
2 May 2013, around 21.06.
By Sven Birkerts, faber & faber, 2006.
Montaigne 1.1
16 January 2015, around 19.26.
Achilles in exanimem Hectora saevit, Domenico Cunego after Gavin Hamilton, 1766 Having another go at Montaigne’s Essais,1 one of those books I always make a brave run at, but abandon a third of the way through, brushed away from the mindset of the book into arbitrary business. I’m not quite sure what to make of […]
Montaigne 1.28
24 July 2015, around 12.23.
I cannot allow those other common friendships to be placed in the same line with ours. I have as much knowledge of them as another, and of the most perfect of their kind, but I should not advise any one to measure them with the same rule; he would be much mistaken (190). anachronism –entry […]
Montaigne 1.29
31 July 2015, around 17.49.
Medice, cura teipsum. And what are these essays but grotesque and monstrous bodies, pieced together of different members, without any definite shape, without any order, coherence, or proportion, except they be accidental? —‘Of Friendship’ (183) * * * These poems may be seen elsewhere. —Dedication of 29 sonnets (196)
drawing lots
4 June 2018, around 12.24.
…if ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers and artists […] whom all the learned had admired, not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire: and if we cannot arrive at this union of admiration with knowledge, rather to […]
de finibus
31 May 2020, around 15.23.
There is the sense that the book has an argument, that it wants some sort of artist’s statement to illumine its depths. I complained of this, and PF observed that experimental authors tend to fall into two camps – the Nabokovian and the Joycean. The Nabokovian camp will tell you in great detail all the […]
allerdings
1 May 2024, around 8.49.
…it’s a mistake to argue with a book that contains no arguments. —Becca Rothfeld (‘Nellie Bowles thinks you should outgrow progressivism’) It took me longer than I like to admit to realize that the diversity of topics in most modern essay collections was driven not by the author’s personal interest, but by the crass casualty […]
unravelling
27 August 2024, around 16.09.
That avant-garde culture is the imitation of imitating—the fact itself—calls for neither approval nor disapproval. —Clement Greenberg (‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, p. 8) I was nearly done knitting up a cardigan when I realized that it was entirely wrong. It did not feel right – the yarn I had chosen, though good in itself, was wrong for […]