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.’
Reading
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.
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)
Unlike GDP growth or trade imbalances, inflation gets close to measuring something that people can feel. It is easy to forget this, because a market logic so often creeps in and addles the brains of those who follow it most closely.
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 4 (Friday 03 February 2023)
Britain holds fast to its fourteen British Overseas Territories – from the offshore havens of Bermuda and the Caymans to the thornily disputed Falklands/Malvinas and Gibraltar to the sovereign military base areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia in Cyprus. Among the British holdings, the Chagos Archipelago stands out for the curious fact of its having been retained as a colonial outpost so that parts of it could be gifted to the US military.
Unlike Althusser’s, Tom Nairn’s Marxism would grow almost unrecognisably open and eclectic. Many on the left never forgave him for writing that ‘the theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure,’ or for his insistence that globalisation had liberating, progressive aspects. But many on the right, including Britain’s intelligence services and their clients, never forgave him either – for spreading seditious doctrines threatening to the kingdom.
It is one of the curious qualities of the lighthouse that while its raison d’être is to be visible, durable and stable in the most adverse conditions, it is often seen as a site of ambiguity and insecurity.
To think of Shakespeare’s plays as safe havens for displaced textual agents from different traditions is to understate the underlying violence of the dislocations they display. But to say that the passage of these ideas is fraught and troubled, rather than apolitical, raises one of the abiding problems in Shakespeare studies: the instrumentalisation of real-world pain for a greedy project of relevance.
Kaminsky bought chemistry books from bouquinistes along the Seine and taught himself to make explosives. But when a man known as Penguin (aka Marc Hamon) recruited him for the Resistance, he wasn’t interested in his knowledge of explosives so much as his knowledge of dyes. The Resistance needed papers for passeurs at the border, for members parachuting in from the UK and for Jews at risk of deportation. Kaminsky proved remarkably resourceful and inventive.
Why would my students pay attention to my views on Brexit when I can’t even get them to stop using the word relatable? Teaching is an uncertain affair, full of humility-inducing failures and miscues. Students have their own ideas about what is worth knowing and retaining, not because they are a tribe apart, but because each of them is an adult – unbiddable, unpredictable and indecipherable. My students aren’t relatable, and neither am I.
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.
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...
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The post Palestinians Are Not Liars: Confronting the Violence of Media Delegitimization appeared first on scheerpost.com.