We’re increasingly comfortable with the idea of a book in virtual rather than physical form, but what happens when the content disappears too? Inevitably, we’re left looking at the frame around it. The point about the invisible book is that it suddenly makes other things visible.
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Namwali Serpell’s aesthetic preference is to break a pattern almost before she has established it, to load, aim and cock a symbol but not pull the trigger. In The Furrows, the nexus between disaster, truth-telling and not being believed, though hinted at strongly, doesn’t manifest itself.
In our own time, Grosz’s great theme – the domestic horror show of bourgeoisie – seems to have vanished as a subject, or perhaps it’s just got better at camouflage. But once you’ve seen Grosz’s types, they start popping up everywhere. Perry Anderson described Trump’s entourage of bankers, businessmen and generals as ‘a cabinet out of George Grosz’.
If you can carve your own path to the grave these days, it is because grand narratives have crumbled and can no longer constrain you. Journeys are no longer communal but self-tailored, more like hitchhiking than a coach tour. They are no longer mass products but for the most part embarked on alone. The world has ceased to be story-shaped, which means that you can make your life up as you go along. You can own it, just as you can own a boutique.
Centimetre RulerI wanted to stop getting high but you know what they say no sobrietyin the first year of a big life change I think I’m recalling that right I think I...
Cezanne’s private puzzling – just how should masses of lemon and lead white converse? – slips into provocative teasing. No, that plate on the right could hardly have perched in that way on a three-dimensional kitchen table, and yes, the fruit on it perform a balancing act that seems outright miraculous. But painters have always reserved the right to collage their observations, and Cezanne did so with particular vehemence.
Wolf composed around three hundred Lieder, together with mostly minor orchestral works, the most significant being the Italienische Serenade (1892), several worthy choral works, and the opera Der Corregidor (1895). The musicologist Lawrence Kramer has compared him to Chopin, whose output was similarly dominated by a single medium. But Chopin’s piano music is a staple of the repertoire whereas Wolf’s songs, as Kramer points out, ‘are more often praised than sung’.
A rundown wind-up doll, Giuliani seems oblivious to the slapping waves of mocking laughter or outright ire that he provokes, unchastened, undaunted, and is never at a loss for half-assed excuses or conspiracy-mongering. Today he is reportedly broke, without allies, suspended from practising law in New York and Washington, on the verge of indictment for election tampering, looking ever more vagabond. How did such a snub-nosed bullet of a phenomenon become such a miasmic mess?
The body simply goes away when you are trying so intensely to project yourself into someone else, blinking in and out, in pain and on morphine, on the verge of being wheeled back. ‘All of it is so unreal and so convergent,’ I wrote on the hotel stationery, ‘that I feel I am about to invent Surrealism 2.’
At the height of his stardom, long before he became a salad dressing entrepreneur, Newman’s screen presence was more that of a living statue than an actor: a Greek god with a suntan and a side parting. His handsomeness was made for posters and billboards. Many of his early performances look much more convincing and exciting in stills. The speaking Newman, though charismatic, gives very little of himself.
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 4 (Friday 03 February 2023)
1. You’ve invested an enormous amount of time and energy, and you still have no idea what is happening.
2. Everybody you meet speaks in half riddles.
3. Hours spent completing a task are rewarded with meaningless feedback and unhelpful awards.
4. No matter how much you accomplish or how good you do, it’ll never be enough.
5. You don’t know why you are serving whom you are serving, but you serve them all the same as though that service matters.
6. Most of the people you meet want to destroy you.
7. You want to destroy most of the people you meet.
8. You sometimes wear a silly robe.
9. You are surrounded by old, crumbling buildings that were probably really something in their day.
10. The most powerful people you encounter were destroyed by accumulating that power.
11. The rush of excitement upon achieving a long-sought goal is followed by the crippling realization that what you achieved doesn’t actually matter.
12. The people you encounter seem to be working out some long-repressed trauma that neither you nor they understand.
13. Your stats are being kept.
Federal regulators want to put new limits on late fees.
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Doctor Who, James Gunn/Superman/Harley Quinn, Wonder Man, The Blacklist, SNL, AEW, Frasier, and lots more!
25 years of opposition to the historic peace deal by the DUP is paying off
Wagner Crimes: How the UK can Take the Lead on Stopping Putin’s Mercenaries
Mexico is not only dangerously dependent on US growers for its most important staple crop; it is growing more and more dependent each and every year. Mexico's government wants to reverse this dynamic, but the US has other ideas.
Sian Norris speaks to campaigners to learn more about a 20-year fight for justice for rape victims in Bolivia
55 journalists have been killed and hundreds more injured or detained by Israel since 2000. Yet for many Palestinian, the physical harm they face pales in comparison to the constant delegitimization of their work by in the media.
The post Palestinians Are Not Liars: Confronting the Violence of Media Delegitimization appeared first on scheerpost.com.
Matt Taibbi joins CN Live! to discuss the implications of his Twitter Files revelations, including his latest on Hamilton 68 and its fatal blow to the Russiagate narrative. With Chris Hedges and John Kiriakou. Watch the replay.
The post Watch: Twitter Files & the Death of Russiagate appeared first on scheerpost.com.
Can Oppressed People Ever Truly Be Free In America?
The post ‘Freedom’ appeared first on scheerpost.com.
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- by Joe Stadolnik