Richard Wu

Richard Wu rated a book really liked it Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Grizzled after decades of combat, Lucifer retreats to his idyllic home in Carmel-by-the-Sea and composes his treatise on the metaphysics of war before suffering defeat at the hands of a heart attack. By turns it is hilarious, irreverent, pragmatic—si ...more
21 hours, 39 min ago · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Rules for Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Rules for Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Richard Wu rated a book liked it Reveille for Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Alinsky’s infamous Rules for Radicals has sat on my reading list gathering dust for years now, and I figured it was about time to give it its day in the sun. But first came his first RoR, because—doesn’t ideological evolution also fascinate you? A bri ...more
Jul 18, 2018 06:53PM · like · see review
Richard Wu rated a book it was ok Kudos by Rachel Cusk	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Between Outline and Transit, three years, between Transit and Kudos, one. Though I am not privy to the circumstances of Cusk’s life, I would like to submit two hypotheses regarding the relative rapidity of this final chapter’s publication—it owes its ...more
Jul 16, 2018 11:29AM · like · see review
Richard Wu rated a book liked it Transit by Rachel Cusk	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Occasioned by the recent release of Kudos, I decided to continue Cusk’s Faye trilogy. Transit has all of Outline’s hallmark tropes—descriptive facticity, deadpan humor, episodic cadence—but less, I feel, of its charm, either due to its familiar turns ...more
Jul 14, 2018 09:54PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Transit by Rachel Cusk. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Transit by Rachel Cusk <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Richard Wu rated a book it was amazing Finnegans Wake by James Joyce	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Snake charmers understand that the reptilian mind, like ours, is governed by a set of strictures. Though we know not who first discovered the sonic method which, to this day, enables us most reliably to map its parameters of execution, this has not p ...more
Jul 13, 2018 12:20PM · like · see review
Richard Wu rated a book liked it Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You & Your World by Robert Anton Wilson	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
[Hideaki Anno] felt that children should be exposed early to the realities of life so that they do not grow up weak and sheltered and so that they will become immune to some of the harsh situations they will eventually experience. Scream as they may ...more
Jun 30, 2018 02:14AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Quantum Psychology by Robert Anton Wilson. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Quantum Psychology by Robert Anton Wilson <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Richard Wu rated a book it was ok The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling by Anonymous	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
If my words may steer but one prospective reader from this horrendously utilitarian translation (hence two stars not four), I shall rest this life in peace. Compare: (Walsh) And therefore be wary, for surely what beastly heart that presumeth for to tou ...more
Jun 28, 2018 09:44PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling by Anonymous. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling by Anonymous <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Richard Wu rated a book liked it The World Goes On by László Krasznahorkai	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Ring ring hello / who is it / it’s Raymond Carver / he wants to know, “And did you get what / you wanted from this world, even so?” / “No,” says Krasnahorkai, “No.” Two foils: 1. The Egg In Andy Weir’s dialogue, a man—namely, you—dies in a car accident ...more
Jun 26, 2018 12:28AM · like · see review
Richard Wu rated a book really liked it Skylark by Dezső Kosztolányi	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
‘Passable,’ the old man replied. ‘Actually quite…’ For a moment his voice became higher, more enthusiastic, then he seemed to change his mind. ‘Quite passable,’ he concluded, correcting himself in time. [p.45] Is what I’d say if I felt like being snar ...more
Jun 23, 2018 05:42PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Skylark by Dezső Kosztolányi. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Skylark by Dezső Kosztolányi <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Richard Wu rated a book really liked it The Story of Art by E.H. Gombrich	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Like all terms, “art” is defined where inquiry ends, and Gombrich is one who encourages readers to never stop asking. His quite admirable approach is to frame the historical trajectory of art in terms of instrumentality: what art was—and is—for, and ...more
Jun 21, 2018 01:35PM · like · see review

Richard Wu rated a book really liked it

Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals
by Saul D. Alinsky

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Grizzled after decades of combat, Lucifer retreats to his idyllic home in Carmel-by-the-Sea and composes his treatise on the metaphysics of war before suffering defeat at the hands of a heart attack. By turns it is hilarious, irreverent, pragmatic—si Grizzled after decades of combat, Lucifer retreats to his idyllic home in Carmel-by-the-Sea and composes his treatise on the metaphysics of war before suffering defeat at the hands of a heart attack. By turns it is hilarious, irreverent, pragmatic—significantly, in other words, more devilish than its predecessor (the reveille having awoken none from reverie), and significantly, in other words, better.

It does not behoove me to summarize what you would do better to read yourself, which you should, or wane philosophical on the tenets of means-end consequentialism, tempting though it is. In brief: this is political Jeet Kune Do, Sun Tzu reincarnated for the American arena. However, astute readers will discriminate between the axioms Alinsky advances as absolute, universal invariants and those more resembling tactical ephemera, though he tends to clothe (confuse) both as the former. Take for instance:

Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule.

Even if we qualify “potent” with “psychologically” or “politically,” this is false; Trump’s White House is certainly none the weaker for the vitriol it absorbs on a literal daily basis, in fact it is antifragile to such mockery, stronger with every word squawked by those comedians and journalists who believe they are Voltaire while being de facto Bozo. And while Alinsky recognizes the supremacy of kairos:

Once, though—and in rare circumstances even now—sit-downs were really revolutionary.

He was alas insufficiently cynical, or prophetic, to countenance the sacrifice of his own sacred cows, and in other cases frankly delusional:

The preferred world can be seen any evening on television in the succession of programs where the good always wins—that is, until the late evening newscast, when suddenly we are plunged into the world as it is.

But truly, if there is one batch of imbeciles who exceed their liberal counterparts in motivated myopia, it is those who are Right (on more than one spectrum). Notice how, in total contradiction to their oft-espoused virtues of principled debate and rational argumentation, conservatives attack not Alinsky’s ideas per se but always the man behind them, failing never to express their distaste for his methods while privately conceding their utility and using them to their advantage, and their shame, as unfailingly as the priest who preaches contra onanism yet who secretly whacks the log, who groks by his actions that the pleasure of hypocrisy is worth the price of Hell. Thereby proving Alinsky right. And when you understand how he gave them the best present they could ever hope to receive—his playbook—their sheer idiocy only seems to redouble.

To conclude, I suppose one could do worse than meditate on the appearance of that fragmentary nebula philosophy has positively involuted itself trying to reach, Truth. Is she, as has long been held, Beautiful—or Ugly? As I’m sure Alinsky would’ve agreed, it depends on how you look…

Quotables
“It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles.”

“What was my alternative? To draw myself up into righteous ‘moral’ indignation saying, ‘I would rather lose than corrupt my principles,’ and then go home with my ethical hymen intact?”

“Passive resistance was chosen for the same pragmatic reason that all tactics are selected. But it assumes the necessary moral and religious adornments.”

“When you are trying to communicate and can't find the point in the experience of the other party at which he can receive and understand, then, you must create the experience for him.” ...more

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Reveille for Radicals
by Saul D. Alinsky

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Alinsky’s infamous Rules for Radicals has sat on my reading list gathering dust for years now, and I figured it was about time to give it its day in the sun. But first came his first RoR, because—doesn’t ideological evolution also fascinate you?

A bri ...more

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Kudos
by Rachel Cusk

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Between Outline and Transit, three years, between Transit and Kudos, one. Though I am not privy to the circumstances of Cusk’s life, I would like to submit two hypotheses regarding the relative rapidity of this final chapter’s publication—it owes its Between Outline and Transit, three years, between Transit and Kudos, one. Though I am not privy to the circumstances of Cusk’s life, I would like to submit two hypotheses regarding the relative rapidity of this final chapter’s publication—it owes itself either to an inspired bout of frenzy or to a gritting of the teeth, a common attitude to take in finishing those necessary but thoroughly displeasurable chores one now regrets having committed to in advance—and you can of course guess as to which of them I subscribe.

Simply put, the conversations through which Faye is sketched are interesting in proportion to the area Cusk permits her to roam. Outline’s territory is the open Mediterranean, Transit locks Faye into London, but the single day at a literary conference in the unnamed city of Kudos feels, in comparison, like solitary confinement. And while I have no doubt that a capable author could weave delightful magic out of the most quotidian business, never in this trilogy has there been less love for the characters. Here on display is a veritable banality of perspectives mouthed by paragons of narcissism, unsympathetic in the extreme and hungering miserably for attention. Yes, cruelty has been the leitmotif, and perhaps the text reflects this effectively, but my accusation that it lacks a hint of grace stands firm. Is it too much to ask for a touch?

My only other thought. If real adulthood is anything as fatal as the caricature Cusk portrays—and I really don’t think it has to be—then I certainly don’t want to grow up.

Quotables
“In fact, he went on, you could see the whole history of capitalism as a history of combustion, not just the burning of substances that have lain in the earth for millions of years but also of knowledge, ideas, culture and indeed beauty – anything, in other words, that has taken time to develop and accrue.”

“The reception desk, an enormous dark plinth in a sunken hall staffed by a row of uniformed attendants, gave such an impression of grandiose finality that it was as if, Paola said, this was where the wheat was being separated from the chaff.”

“What such a person cannot tolerate, I said, is the suggestion that his experiences have not arisen out of universal conditions but instead can be blamed on particular or exceptional circumstances, and that what he was treating as truth was in fact no more than personal fortune; any more than the addict, I said, ought to believe that he can regain his innocence of things of which he already has a fatal knowledge.” ...more

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Transit
by Rachel Cusk

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Occasioned by the recent release of Kudos, I decided to continue Cusk’s Faye trilogy. Transit has all of Outline’s hallmark tropes—descriptive facticity, deadpan humor, episodic cadence—but less, I feel, of its charm, either due to its familiar turns Occasioned by the recent release of Kudos, I decided to continue Cusk’s Faye trilogy. Transit has all of Outline’s hallmark tropes—descriptive facticity, deadpan humor, episodic cadence—but less, I feel, of its charm, either due to its familiar turns or more likely because what sustains my literary curiosity has shifted.

But here for the grace of God go I, who find myself once again at the dissection table. Transit’s very structure reflects its pervasive tone of post-ironic detachment, to read it is to board a train with no destination in mind, pausing at stops but never disembarking. For all this its starkly deterministic gaze is less a voyeur’s and more a museum curator’s, interested only in cataloguing the vicissitudes it would rather forget its part in forming. Wisdoms earned through deep suffering and dramatic outbursts of action are alike embalmed with clinical sterility, life itself Faye’s phantom limb.

The easiest, and biggest, error Cusk’s reader could err is to assume Faye is her doppelganger. As her innovative dialogue perspective-cutting—“As I could see, he said, it was in pretty poor condition”—indicates, she is at once all her characters and none of them. However, the book’s implicitly Spinozist ethic is one I cannot fully abide, knowing too well how its promises of freedom fossilize adherents into inert chunks of amber. Tragically, I suspect Cusk and I share the same tar pit; no one who writes stuff like the below can fail to recognize its profound hypocrisy. Kudos to her for publishing it anyway:

For a long time, I said, I believed that it was only through absolute passivity that you could learn to see what was really there. But my decision to create a disturbance by renovating my house had awoken a different reality, as though I had disturbed a beast sleeping in its lair. I had started to become, in effect, angry. I had started to desire power, because what I now realised was that other people had had it all along, that what I called fate was merely the reverberation of their will, a tale scripted not by some universal storyteller but by people who would elude justice for as long as their actions were met with resignation rather than outrage.

Other quotables
“It seemed possible that the same computer algorithms that had generated this email had also generated the astrologer herself: her phrases were too characterful, and the note of character was repeated too often; she was too obviously based on a human type to be, herself, human.”

“The things that I had jettisoned in my pursuit of a new future, now that that future had itself been jettisoned, retained a growing power of accusation, to the extent that I had come to fear that I was being punished in direct proportion to something I hadn’t even managed to assess or enumerate.”

“The back door to the basement flat stood directly beneath my kitchen window. Twice a day it would open to release a shrivelled, hobbling dog into the filthy courtyard and then slam shut again.”

“He supposed, he said, that the time would come when the book people were now reading would seem no more personal to him than the skin a snake has discarded and left lying there.”

“I asked her what she took photographs of.
Food, she said.” ...more

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Finnegans Wake
by James Joyce

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Snake charmers understand that the reptilian mind, like ours, is governed by a set of strictures. Though we know not who first discovered the sonic method which, to this day, enables us most reliably to map its parameters of execution, this has not p ...more

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Quantum Psychology by Robert Anton Wilson

Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You & Your World
by Robert Anton Wilson

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[Hideaki Anno] felt that children should be exposed early to the realities of life so that they do not grow up weak and sheltered and so that they will become immune to some of the harsh situations they will eventually experience.

Scream as they may

[Hideaki Anno] felt that children should be exposed early to the realities of life so that they do not grow up weak and sheltered and so that they will become immune to some of the harsh situations they will eventually experience.

Scream as they may—even that their throats burn dry their voices—our future selves can have no audience with egos prior, for the present through which our lives are doomed to fumble is an anechoic chamber: impenetrable, deafening. Still, I’d time travel this to my sophomore self in college if I could, I suspect it would’ve saved him a lot of trouble; and that I should be reading this now at the behest of a sophomore I met in January, is this—yutaro.jpg—synchronicity?

Precocious kid, Ivy League, taking graduate-level physics two years out of high school: persuasion via ethos. Surely I wouldn’t otherwise consider taking up a tome whose title reeks of rank pretension. Which there is plenty of, to be sure, so let’s pop some pimples.

“E’,” that is “E-Prime,” or “English-Prime,” is a syntactical constriction whose creator, the onetime philosopher Al “The Map Is Not The Territory” Korzybski, proposed as a general upgrade to the very language in which you now read; to be tabooed is the verb to be—is, in all its forms—because, so goes the theory, demarcating identity relations implicitly biases Essentialism over Pragmatism, Operationalism, and Functionalism, what have you, where the latter expressional modalities largely reflect behavior in action, that is actuality, and not metaphysical Platonic ideals. From this of course we get world peace, love, and unity forever.

While I find myself in no position to evaluate to plausibility of such claims, I do know a thing or two about rats; they can hide from my sight but not from my nose.

…but the Vatican remains firm in the principle that only a male—a human with a Willy—can transform the “essence” of bread into the “essence” of a dead body. [p.102]

Bohm, its father, does not claim it ranks as "the only true model" or the "final" model or anything like that. [p.192]

Reader Exercize [sic]: Identify the ‘is’ hidden in each quote above. Too easy? The text is strewn with such examples. More substantively, I’d say eliminating ‘is’ from the dictionary leads to verbal bloat, increasing instead of reducing communicative complexity. While it is in some sense more technically correct to say, in response to a hypothetical cross-examination, “I recall the car as a blue Ford” rather than, “The car was a blue Ford,” the latter (controlling for tone) connotes more certainty and this semantic difference should not go unignored. Taken to the extreme, you get Derrideans who insist on laying out the entire encyclopedia of assumptions undergirding every statement they make: a habit which, as Zizek often critiques, inevitably cripples their ability to say anything.

Another annoyance comes from RAW’s hyper-trivial claim that he sees UFOs all the time because he doesn’t identify every passing object in the sky (obviously not what people mean when they say UFO). He then coins the acronym UNFO, or “Unidentified Non-Flying Object,” because of course—facepalm— we don’t identify everything that crosses our paths either. To briefly reply: (A) There’s many reasons we don’t bother; (B) “UNFO” does not capture, in the Shannon sense, any valuable informational content; and (C) The facticity of indeterminate perceptual objects should not cue one to wax poetic about quantum uncertainty.

That said, it is a major bonus that RAW writes gracefully—proving once again that good delivery can make up for conceptual vapidity. But I’ve been too harsh. The book introduces, in some form or other, Perspectivism, the notion of Umwelt(s), and the benefits of probabilistic versus absolutist or binary thinking, all of which in my opinion are quite valuable for the general person to come to terms with. So long as you can spot where Wilson overextends his physics metaphors and salt the Whiggish futurism, I’d still recommend giving this a go. ...more

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The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling
by Anonymous

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If my words may steer but one prospective reader from this horrendously utilitarian translation (hence two stars not four), I shall rest this life in peace. Compare:

(Walsh)
And therefore be wary, for surely what beastly heart that presumeth for to tou

If my words may steer but one prospective reader from this horrendously utilitarian translation (hence two stars not four), I shall rest this life in peace. Compare:

(Walsh)
And therefore be wary, for surely what beastly heart that presumeth for to touch the high mount of this work, it shall be beaten away with stones. Stones be hard and dry in their kind, and they hurt full sore where they hit. And surely such rude strainings be full hard fastened in fleshliness of bodily feeling, and full dry from any witting of grace; and they hurt full sore the silly soul, and make it fester in fantasy feigned of fiends.

(Johnston)
So be careful. Surely anyone who presumes to approach this lofty mountain of contemplative prayer through sheer brute force will be driven off with stones. Stones as you know are hard, dry things that hurt terribly when they strike. Certainly morbid constraint will also hurt your health, for it is lacking the dew of grace and therefore completely dry. Besides it will do great harm to your foolish mind, leading it to flounder in diabolical illusions.

In the fullness of nature’s ferny thickets lies in blood bedecked the devil’s due, the sanguine trident by whose three prongs are graceful forms corrupted. Witness, reader, transmutation—the passage, then, with beauty brimmed; the carcass, now, disfigured—sear the image of its ferrous rot into your memory’s deepest ravine so the coarse black mold of sin may escape it never. Begone, Satan, begone, Johnston, defile my text no longer.

As for its content, that is its meat, I have little to say. Can a synesthete induce his reality—or what we might call his hallucinations—in a neurotypical mind by supplying it with precise descriptions of mental mechanics, so as to produce a technical manual of sorts for the experience of given phenomena? Surely the steps would be generalizable only insofar as there is consistency in neural architecture; the base specification of one’s brain thus determines his possibility of accessing these states. In other words, “God, in his wisdom, determines the course and the character of each one’s contemplative journey according to the talents and gifts he has given him (chapter 71).”

Assuming we possess sufficient neurological analogy, the second challenge is for the guru to convey his teaching in such a way that we can follow through, and here the prospect of squaring our understandings depends on the thickness of the communication barrier. “Raise your knee” is obvious enough, but “Think like this,” well, how commensurable is that really? Picasso once said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child,” and while another artist may verify that he is indeed now able to paint like a child, there are none who can confirm that we are now able to think—or will, or love—as we once did—or didn’t—in the womb, or before.

I mean not to deny the reality of the phenomena in question, only to highlight the difficulty of transmitting methods of possessing them. Given that there is, after all, no private language, exactly how might we decalcify our lifelong habits and from our Fall ascend to Second Eden? Perhaps the answer is to bump against as much media regarding the matter as possible and hope one day the gears click in place. That’s the best I’ve got; ’til then we’re at the mercy of raindrops:

Some of these people are unbelievably deceived by the devil, who will even send them a sort of dew which they suppose to be the heavenly food of angels. It seems to come softly and delicately out of the skies, marvelously finding its way into their mouths. [p.110]

...more

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The World Goes On
by László Krasznahorkai

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Ring ring hello / who is it / it’s Raymond Carver / he wants to know, “And did you get what / you wanted from this world, even so?” / “No,” says Krasnahorkai, “No.”

Two foils:

1. The Egg
In Andy Weir’s dialogue, a man—namely, you—dies in a car accident Ring ring hello / who is it / it’s Raymond Carver / he wants to know, “And did you get what / you wanted from this world, even so?” / “No,” says Krasnahorkai, “No.”

Two foils:

1. The Egg
In Andy Weir’s dialogue, a man—namely, you—dies in a car accident on his way home. God then informs him the universe is an egg, he is in the fetal stage of apotheosis and is to live, through a series of reincarnations, every human life that ever was or will be lived before his birth and ascension.

2. Enter The Void
In Gaspar Noé’s film, a man—namely, a junkie gaijin—dies after being shot through a bathroom door in a Tokyo clubhouse. His ghost then separates from his body and we observe its first-person perspective as it drifts around the city, voyeuristically inhabiting the lifeworlds of various others with whom he’d been involved before finally and dreamily entering the past of his mother’s womb to be born again in eternal return.

The World Goes On fuses these motifs; its narrator flits about the globe, exploring the concerns now of a marble quarry laborer boy in Estremoz, now of a Budai-shaped engineer-beggar on the Ganges riverbank, now of a conspiracy theorist, warded in a mental asylum, obsessed with Yuri Gagarin’s post-launch life. But these threads trail off as suddenly as they begin, in media res, indeterminate not because all stories must by nature be but between the lines because the raconteur clearly suffers from a certain… Weariness? Tedium? Ennui?

I believe by now it should be obvious to you that this lecturer can tell you nothing new about the subject of his lecture. [p.39]

Wittgenstein humors, not without good reason, the prospect that only those who’ve thought his thoughts could really grasp what it was he was writing about, but the corollary, for those who have, is: why bother. I won’t leave you hanging; even we enjoy identification, to say (or better, feel): “Ah, there’s someone like me.” But I tell you this, if thirty years from now, if in my fifth decade you should catch me nursing the same thoughts as this narrator or any of his pet fascinations--just shoot me now, get it over with, because I insist, dear Krasznahorkai, on asking aren’t you getting a bit old for this sort of thing, seeking resolution; memory works like this, coincidence works like this.

You say we do not speak as we write so you write as you think we speak: effusively, without neat breaks or pauses, but speech, you see, is not writing nor writing speech, which is why we speak as we speak and write as we write and why, after a few pages if not paragraphs of this gatling ratatat, the cadence starts feeling a bit gratuitous, a bit grating, and why my friend felt a bit traumatized, a bit gunned down one might say, after trying rather valiantly to stomach its marathon prose—and I do (but only now) forgive myself for lending her this rainbow-bound volume before having read it myself—for nearly a month before giving up—some soul searching was required—near the middle and passing back the baton to its accursed owner, who, I daresay, needs not be reminded of the so-called power of literature to change people and (in this case) set goodwill aflame; all to serve, what, a parlor trick? anyone can do this, I would know. ...more

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Skylark
by Dezső Kosztolányi

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‘Passable,’ the old man replied. ‘Actually quite…’ For a moment his voice became higher, more enthusiastic, then he seemed to change his mind. ‘Quite passable,’ he concluded, correcting himself in time. [p.45]

Is what I’d say if I felt like being snar ...more

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The Story of Art
by E.H. Gombrich

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Like all terms, “art” is defined where inquiry ends, and Gombrich is one who encourages readers to never stop asking. His quite admirable approach is to frame the historical trajectory of art in terms of instrumentality: what art was—and is—for, and ...more