“My girlfriend and I were standing in our kitchen—while I pondered the hopelessness of writing a book about a poet. Well she tooted. Have you ever considered the demographic you are writing for. Yes I have as a matter of fact. While I lowered her into a shallow grave.” -Eileen Myles, Inferno
la la la (Richard Beck's blog)
January 30, 2012
Inferno
September 21, 2011
September 13, 2011
Ellen Willis on Bruce Springsteen
“I especially enjoyed the way he moved, acting out each song (dancing down the street, mounting his Harley) with just the right mixture of drama and self-parody, projecting a sense of maleness that depended not on the exclusion or denigration or conquest of women but on his appreciation of his body and what it could do.”
That’s the best description of Bruce that I have ever read. Remember when he performed at the Super Bowl halftime show, and accidentally slid his crotch directly into the camera lens, and instead of thinking it was gross and awful everyone just thought it was funny, and that Bruce was just as much a treasure as always?
April 11, 2011
"There is no Hitler building as such. We are quartered in Centenary Hall, a dark brick structure we share with the popular culture department, known officially as American environments. A curious group. The teaching staff is composed almost solely of New York émigrés, smart, thuggish, movie-mad, trivia-crazed. They are here to decipher the natural language of the culture, to make a formal method of the shiny pleasures they’d known in their Europe-shadowed childhoods — an Aristotelianism of bubble gum wrappers and detergent jingles."
— Don DeLillo, White Noise, p. 9. (via keyholez) (If you, like me, are somebody who reviews things or writes about culture in a non-fictional way, I think it’s healthy to check in with this quote every once in a while. Otherwise you can end up writing like Zizek or Jonathan Lethem.)
April 6, 2011
More Tocqueville
Sorry, I’ll stop after this, but one of the really nice things about “Democracy in America” is although Tocqueville is a genius at making fun of Americans, he isn’t petty. He saves his serious criticisms for the country’s serious wrongs, like slavery or the treatment of Indians.
That said, check out what a genius he is at making fun of us! This excerpt is a bit long, but I promise that almost every sentence is funnier than the one that came before it:
“Americans, in their relations with foreigners, seem impatient of the slightest censure and insatiable in their appetite for priase. They are pleased by the merest of commendations and seldom satisfied by the fullest. They pester you constantly for your praise, and if you hold out against the importuning, they will laud themselves. Doubtful perhaps of their own merit, they wish to have its portrait constantly before their eyes. Their vanity is not only greedy but also restless and envious. It gives nothing yet is always asking to receive. It is simultaneously grasping and argumentative.
I say to an American that he lives in a beautiful country. He replies, “Yes, indeed, there is none other like it in the world!” I admire the liberty that its inhabitants enjoy, and he responds, “Liberty is a precious gift, but very few peoples are worthy of it.” I remark on the purity of morals prevailing in the United States: “I can imagine,” he says, “that a foreigner struck by the corruption that is so glaringly apparent in all other nations might be surprised by such a sight.” Ultimately I leave him to contemplate himself, but he returns to my side and refuses to leave until he has made me repeat what I have just told him. A patriotism more trying or loquacious is impossible to imagine. It wearies even those who honor it.”
Ultimately I leave him to contemplate himself, but
April 6, 2011
Tocqueville
I’m about 700 pages in to Democracy in America, and I keep thinking about how bored I would have been by this book had I been forced to read it in high school. Actually it’s the best.
Here’s a quote from a chapter called “ON THE GRAVITY OF AMERICANS AND WHY IT DOES NOT PREVENT THEM FROM ACTING RASHLY”: “An American, instead of dancing joyously in the public square in his hours of leisure as many people of similar occupation still do throughout much of Europe, may retire to his private sanctum to drink alone. Such a man will savor two pleasures at once: while thinking about business he can become decently inebriated in familial seclusion. I used to think that the English were the most serious-minded people on earth, but now that I have seen the Americans, I have changed my mind.”
February 6, 2011
Two ideas about buying things
I always had a passion for flashing
Before I had it, I close my eyes and imagine
-Kanye West
and
Joel has designed a watch
In platinum.
This watch is the sequel
To anyone you have ever lost.
-Frederick Seidel
February 3, 2011
December 1, 2010
via i.imgur.com
h/t gms
September 28, 2010
The Wire at Harvard
Because of Lorrie Moore’s boring, boring piece in the NYRB, I was thinking again about how Harvard is teaching a course on The Wire this year. Earlier this month, two of the professors who will be teaching the course made their case for why using a TV show to teach people about the inner city is a good idea. Then at The Awl, Choire objected to the idea that a fictional TV show is the best way for people to learn about actual inner cities:
So the claim is that the top-notch sociology students of America are unfamiliar with (and probably not of) the urban poor and they will learn empathy and be introduced to poor people through a made-up TV program. That seems a little broken.
It’s really obvious to me that Choire is right, and I am someone who does think that reading and watching long-form fiction can make you a better person. What the Harvard professors have wrong is the idea that fiction makes you more empathetic in this direct way where the sequence goes 1. You meet a certain kind of person on the screen (or in the text) 2. You see a real version of that kind of person in the world 3. Because of your exposure to that kind of person in the TV show, you better understand this actual person.
That’s not how it works.
I don’t see what the difference is between getting all your ideas about black people from BET and getting all your ideas about black people from The Wire. The representation of black people that shows up in The Wire is so much better than that on BET, obviously, but the consequence of both is that you walk into a place you have no idea about thinking that you understand it. So, whereas the BET fan will see a guy in a do-rag and think, “Man he probably has a gun in his belt and also loves buying platinum chains!” a fan of The Wire will see the same guy and go, “Man he probably got caught up in the drug game for a little bit, but I’m sure he wants a better life!” Neither of these encounters involve actually meeting someone you don’t know anything about.
What The Wire can actually teach you is how to be quiet and listen. The experience of watching The Wire is not the experience of living in downtown Baltimore, nor is it the experience of increasing your own empathy for any actual person who lives there. It is the experience of patiently learning how to understand fictional characters who talk in ways that are unfamiliar to you at the beginning of the show. The way this might be valuable in the actual world is that, if you ever bother to walk into someplace like downtown Baltimore, your first response will be to pay attention. That’s why the name of the show is a reference to a technology for secretly listening to other people.
RSS feed: http://youreaghost.tumblr.com/rss
1 of 6
Next page
-
A 1971 letter from artist Nancy Spero to art historian and curator Lucy Lippard.
-
-
business proposal: a Tumblr tontine!
Tontines … start paying off right away—the classic tontine basically is a weird annuity. You pay a...
-
Can we stop it with this David versus Goliath narrative about the NBA Finals?
I don’t give a shit which of these teams wins as I have few positive...
-
I work here.
-
=(
-
Sorry for cutting off the left side of this, but isn’t management-speak silly? Personally, I don’t like to lead insightfully, innovate dynamically,...
-
