Thursday, January 28, 2016
Contrary to history, art describes individuals, desires only the unique. It does not classify, it unclassifies. No matter how much they may engage us, our generalizations may be likened to those pursued upon the planet Mars, and three lines drawn to intersect them might form a triangle on all the points of the universe. But […]
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
Players had an entire “Night‗the length of which they agreed on themselves—to reach the heart of the labyrinth and find the exit. Bencivenga had surpassed his own genius by creating a maze generated by the variables determined by the rolls of the die. However, the real game began only when one of the characters finally […]
Yes, Oe is indeed representative [“of a dying literary tradition, a tradition which was unique to the set of circumstances that produced the society of immediate postwar Japan”]—if not in style then certainly in thematic obsessions of postwar literature. Oe shares with these writers, but perhaps feels more intensely, a need for some form of […]
Though the artist has beliefs, like other people, he realizes that a salient characteristic of art is a radical openness to persuasion. Even those beliefs he’s surest of, the artist puts under pressure to see if they will stand. He may have a pretty clear idea where his experiment will lead, as Dostoevsky did when […]
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Two contradictory principles lay at the foundation of the structure of the Russian soul, the one a natural, Dionysian, elemental paganism and the other ascetic monastic Orthodoxy. The mutually contradictory properties of the Russian people may be set out thus: despotism, the hypertrophy of the State, and on the other hand anarchism and license: cruelty, […]
First: He should be discreet and silent, revealing to no one the result of his operations. Second: He should reside in an isolated house in an isolated position. Third: He should choose his days and hours for labour with discretion. Fourth: He should have patience, diligence, and perseverance. Fifth: He should perform according to fixed […]
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
The contemporary cynic – which on many days describes myself – might respond that we still live by all of these [historical] interpretive frameworks, and that only their outer shell has changed – the mythological has become the stuff of the culture industries, spinning out big-budget, computer-generated films and merchandise; the theological has diffused into […]
Thursday, October 8, 2015
The very notion of a ‘mathematics of chaos’ seems to suggest a grotesque domestication, such as the enfeeblement of chaos into a statistically intelligible randomness. For this reason my immediate reaction to the mathematics of chaos was one of visceral suspicion, even though a thread of eighteenth and nineteenth century German philosophy had prepared me […]
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
On calm black waters filled with sleeping stars White Ophelia floats like a lily, Floating so slowly, bedded in long veils … —Hunting horns rise from the distant forest. A thousand years without sad Ophelia, A white ghost on the long black river; A thousand years of her sweet madness Murmuring its ballad in the […]
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Nyuni ya Layali Ewe nyumi ya layali pokea zangu salamu miye kula huwa sili menivamu muadhamu kama nanga ya jabali nimezidiwa ghulamu. Barua yangu pokea uyasome yalo humu yapate kukuelea yakuingie timamu mno tena niwilia kisoma zangu salamu. Nijile kwako, mwandani, ni uswahibu napenda meambatana na ini mahaba yamenikunda kama nswi baharini na kwangu yamenitanda. […]