January 2011
33 posts
The unused quote
“We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends. The road of the traffic, the passage of undifferentiated faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the features from faces. People might walk through me. And, what is this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar— forest trees or the roar...
the perfect allegory for my writing process →
“But if one day you do not come after breakfast, if one day I see you in some...”
– Virginia Woolf, The Waves
4 tags
I'm listed in Tumblweeds under books, paris,...
So there’s this Tumblweeds thing that bills itself as “a user-generated community directory that rates Tumblr bloggers by their number of followers.” In case you care, you can find me listed in #books, #paris, and #academia, because there was no category for “the pedantic musings of the late-stage dissertation-writer.”
“In Britain, the defence of public goods can feel like a deeply conservative...”
– Boyd Tonkin, “Struggle on the Shelves,” The Independent.
Damrosch on Pamuk
from “Toward a History of World Literature.” New Literary History, Volume 39, Number 3, Summer 2008, pp. 481-495.
If literature has always already been international, it remains ineluctably national in today’s global world. Even far-flung languages, such as Arabic, English, and Spanish, are locally inflected and have regional centers of publication and distribution. “Global” writers...
Provincializing Pamuk
I’m thinking about what Orhan Pamuk had to say at the Jaipur Literary Festival this past weekend, which I find fascinating, whinging, problematic, and wrong-headed, all at the same time:
“Most of the writers at a festival such as Jaipur [write] in English,” he said. “This is maybe because English is the official language here. But for those writing in other languages,...
Infinite City
Some of my friends (Ok, mostly just Craig) are getting awfully excited about this book.
What makes a place? Infinite City, Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, searches out the answer by examining the many layers of meaning in one place, the San Francisco Bay Area. Aided by artists, writers, cartographers, and twenty-two gorgeous color maps, each of which...
Happy Virginia Woolf's birthday
Who was I then? Adeline Virginia Stephen, the second daughter of Leslie and Julia Prinsep Stephen, born on 25th January 1882, descended from a great many people, some famous, others obscure; born into a large connection, born not of rich parents, but of well-to-do parents, born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world; so that I could...
The teapot story
No one can tell a teapot story with as much charm as Claire of Lola is Beauty. I have this weird idea that I want her to invite me over for breakfast at her place in South London. And then I want us to take the Eurostar back to (South) Paris so she can redecorate my apartment.
Moments of Being
“The next memory— all these colour-and-sound memories hang together at St Ives— was much more robust; it was highly sensual. It was later. It still makes me feel warm; as if everything were ripe; humming; sunny; smelling so many smells at once; and all making a whole that even now makes me stop— as I stopped then going down to the beach; I stopped at the top to look down at the...
WatchNew Year’s Eve with Texas Couscous at the Alimentation Générale. Like the best high school pep rally ever. Especially when the boys took off their clothes.
The "finish if it kills me" January playlist →
