Toni Morrison is not envious of her characters. They are not punished for the qualities she has given them. Pride does not always come before a fall. Beauty is not bestowed so it might be marred or destroyed. The people in her pages are allowed to love one another and forbear from cruelty. The punishments meted out might be catastrophic, but they have clear origins in the unbearable realities of racism.
Reading
Jon Fosse doesn’t use sentences, or prefers not to end them. When you open Septology, with its smallish print and narrow margins, it can feel like a death sentence – all the more so since the book, much possessed with death, runs to more than eight hundred pages. There are no paragraphs or full stops here. Fosse has called the writing ‘slow prose’ and it lingers on moments – hours even – when nothing much happens.
The most common complaint about Dickens in his lifetime was that he exaggerated, that his characters were implausible specimens of humanity. Prince, too, was seen as going far beyond the norm, especially in his sexuality (he developed a guitar that could be wanked off over a crowd, spattering them with water; he wore backless trousers at the VMAs).
22 October. One casualty of Covid (and I don’t think it’s age) has been chronology. These days I’m often confused by what day it is, not to mention the date. Keeping the diary has been a different sort of casualty as politics became difficult to ignore and Boris Johnson tedious to chronicle. By the time I’d got round to Liz Truss she’d gone.
If I think about the concept of sea level hard enough, I experience disorientation, almost motion sickness, as awareness grows that I’m not living on solid ground but on a sinking chunk of planetary crust, on the surface of a not-really-spherical spinning globe, at the mercy of the nearest star, two icecaps and a capricious moon that sloshes the oceans to and fro like a child rocking in an over-filled bath.
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 1 (Friday 16 December 2022)
Jacopo’s San Pier Maggiore altarpiece was too large and cumbersome to fit onto a single wall in its original, three-tier configuration. For almost thirty years, the panels were arranged across two walls, the Coronation of the Virgin and attendant saints facing the other two tiers across the room. Displayed this way, the work lost not only a sense of its intended function but also much of its symbolism.
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 1 (Friday 16 December 2022)
For British nationalists and imperialists, it has always been uncomfortable to think of Roman London as a medium-sized provincial capital on the periphery of someone else’s empire. It’s even worse to think of it as dependent on state subsidies from a Roman (read: European) superpower; or to face up to the city’s decline in the fifth century following the dissolution of imperial infrastructure and the final withdrawal of troops to the Continent – a kind of enforced Brexit.
The magpie came back to the courtyard & its deep chill the magpie was a jay was a jackdaw was a bird in Germany if not a German bird. Whither the Carolingians and their monks whose recipes...
‘Like having my skull opened with a tin-opener,’ Angela Carter said about reading Baudelaire as a teenager. Discovering the Claudine books, even at my age and with my Bataille phase far behind me, I recognised what she meant. What is known and not known, shameful or not shameful, permissible and impermissible: it’s all done differently in Colette.
Research into the generation and interpretation of what computer scientists call natural language processing has made extraordinary progress over the last ten years, and powerful systems now...
PORTLAND, Ore., 14 December, 2022—Drupal, the most powerful open source content management system for everyone from the small non-profit to the enterprise, is launching the latest upgrade to its popular software.
Drupal 10 comes with even more features that Drupal developers and users love. What sets Drupal apart is its flexibility; modularity is one of its core principles. With Drupal 10, users will find even more incredible tools to help build the versatile, structured content that dynamic web experiences require.
Drupal 10 - Continuous innovation in technology and user experience
This latest version brings Drupal to the next level with a modernized backend look and a future-proof platform upgrade. The updated version delivers powerful new features and an enhanced user experience.
When we renewed our roster of bloggers a little while ago, I mentioned that there would be more announcements to come. Today I’m very happy to say that Macarena Marey will be joining us at Crooked Timber. I met Macarena a few years ago at a workshop in Bayreuth and was immediately impressed by her […]
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- by Maxime Polleri
Iain Overton meets the unwell residents of Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican town trapped between the guns of the north and the drugs of the south
Influential agribusiness monopolists and food producers appear to be cynically using the war in Ukraine and the aftermath of the pandemic to exert political influence, writes Thomas Perrett
Daniel Christen and Nicola Shadbolt Geoeconomic fragmentation is one of the greatest risks to the international monetary and financial system at present, particularly since Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Fragmentation is likely to have wide-ranging implications for the global economy, including increasing the volatility of capital flows and exposing gaps in the global financial … Continue reading Precautionary facilities: stitches for a fragmented financial safety net
I have been drinking alcohol since I was 15.
I was having an exchange with an old friend on Mastodon (yes, I’m there now @deanbaker13@econtwitter.net), in which I was arguing that the best way to get alternatives to the current patent system was to have examples of successful drugs developed without relying on patent monopolies. Of course, there are great historical examples, like the […]
The post We Don’t Need Government-Granted Patent Monopolies to Finance Drug Development appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.
In Parliament recently, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese gave his most powerful statement yet in response to a question about Julian Assange's persecution. read now...
*The brucesterling-tumblr memes greatest hits for 2022, now all in one convenient place for maximum viral-ization