Pavlo > Recent Status Updates

(1) “There’s a comprehensive native apothegm: “Camden by the sea, Rockland by the smell.”

“All right, so the obvious point: Great athletes usually turn out to be stunningly inarticulate about just those qualities and experiences that constitute their fascination. For me, though, the important question is why this is always so bitterly disappointing. And why I keep buying these sports memoirs with expectations that my own experience with the genre should long ago have modified…”

“(It is, admittedly, difficult to imagine William F. Buckley using or perhaps even being aware of anything besides [Standard Written English])”

“Plus, the apparent redundancy of “Where’s it at?” is offset by its metrical logic: what the at really does is license the contraction of is after the interrogative adverb. You can’t say “Where’s it?” So the choice is between “Where is it?” and “Where’s it at?”, and the latter, a strong anapest, is prettier and trips off the tongue better than “Where is it?”

“Did you know that US lexicography even /had/ a seamy underbelly?»

The little essay on Kafka was very interesting

“The whole quantum setup ends up being embarrassing in the special way something pretentious is embarrassing when it’s also wrong.”

“When a solipsist dies, after all, everything goes with him. And no US novelist has mapped the inner terrain of the solipsist better than John Updike, whose rise in the 1960s and ’70s established him as both chronicler and voice of probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV.”

I am learning much that I would rather not know. Good writing, though

“D. Filth says that debate over the motives behind the Chokehold-360º-Hair-Cleavage fiasco has been vigorous and multiform for 20 months now.”

It’s bits like these – in a footnote as well – that compel me to keep reading, even when this particular essay is one I might usually rather skip

“after a while you begin to intuit that the host isn’t acting out of regard or affection for you so much as simply going around obeying the imperatives of some personal neurosis having to do with ... cleanliness and order… which means that, since the ultimate point and object of the cleaning isn’t you but rather cleanliness and order, it’s going to be a relief for her when you leave."

“...I mean, if pampering and radical kindness don’t seem motivated by strong affection and thus don’t somehow affirm one or help assure one that one is not, finally, a dork, of what final and significant value is all this indulgence and cleaning?)”

What I observed was that the preterite workers did have a sort of affection for the passengers, but that it was a comparative affection—even the most absurdly demanding passenger seemed kind and understanding compared to the martinetism of the Greeks, and the crew seemed genuinely grateful for this, sort of the way we find even very basic human decency moving if we encounter it in NYC or Boston.

This mirrored historical paradox—between care workers’ absent presence and industrial workers present absence—is the puzzle of this book. How do the simultaneous growth of this industry and the persistent marginalization of its workers fit into the country’s changing political economy?

There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir—especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased—I felt despair.

От… коли вправний письменник, справжній майстер, просто, вибачте на слові, *вийобується* тим, який він вправний письменник

Тобто, я розумію, що і в його випадку це купа роботи, але…

…the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one pursuit. An almost ascetic focus. A sub-sumption of almost all other features of human life to their one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very serious and very small.

“Joyce is even more impressive, but I hadn’t seen Joyce yet. And Enqvist is even more impressive than Joyce, and Agassi live is even more impressive than Enqvist. After the week was over, I truly understand why Charlton Heston looks gray and ravaged on his descent from Sinai: past a certain point, impressiveness is corrosive to the psyche.”

With a good writer, even the footnotes are impressive

They are practicing groundstrokes down the line—R’s forehand and H’s backhand—each ball plumb-line straight and within centimeters of the corner, the players moving with the compact nonchalance I’ve since come to recognize in pros when they’re working out: the suggestion is one of a very powerful engine in low gear.”

“One more reason the tournament industry sort of hates upsets is that the ATP press liaisons have to go around teaching journalists how to spell and pronounce new names.”

Also, the “Slavs” is very much noted, thank you

“There are malevolent Slavs with scary haircuts.”

Viktor Krum, amirite?

But seriously, dude?

“One Lost Highway crewperson described Scott Cameron as “the Mozart of stress,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.)”

“Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.”