That is why beauty, unlike the other aesthetic qualities, the sublime included, is a value.
Arthur C. Danto, from The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (thanks, passionofashkan)
(Source: the-final-sentence)
If we're all takers, craving to see.
and other half statements of conditionality that seem to rule this blog/life.
Egon Schiele - Sunflower; 1908.
(via buried-denmark)
› 10 Excellent Essays About Words
tetw:
A Tetw reading list
How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard - Not reading is our main way of relating to most literature, find out how to make the most of your ignorance.
Tense Present by David Foster Wallace - In one of his finest essays, DFW reviews a dictionary of English usage, thereby tackling everything from democracy and free will to racism in academia.
The Rise of the Essay by Zadie Smith - Why do novelists write essays? And what excatly is an essay these days?
Words by Tony Judt - One of the very best essayists refelcts on his relationship with words.
The Birth of ‘The New Journalism’ by Tom Wolfe - Who put the ‘I’ in journalism? Tom Wolfe seems to think it was him and his friends.
Own Your Own Words by Steven Johnson - The ubiquity of Google has made it easy to gain control of a word or phrase, what effect is this new power having?
A Linguistic Big Bang by Lawrence Osborne - “For the first time in history, scholars are witnessing the birth of a language, a complex sign system being created by deaf children in Nicaragua.”
Cyber-Neologoliferation by James Gleick - A guided tour through the strange world of the lexicographer.
The Language of the Future by Henry Hitchings - A fascinating look at how English is mutating as it becomes the world’s lingua franca.
Printed Words, Computers, and Democratic Societies by Irving Louis Horowitz - This essay from 1983 looks forward to the advent home copmuting and the “videotext revolution”.
Semester so far:
My proclivity for post-apocalyptic novels and critical theory has insured that I have yet to read one vaguely redemptive or uplifting thing this semester. This has caused me to believe that the world will end tomorrow if I don’t die from some toxic event before the world-ending business happens.
Egon Schiele, Sonnenbaum, 1910.
(via buried-denmark)
And, suddenly, Rings of Saturn made sense.
The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder. Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and it will shape your life. Without memories there wouldn’t be any writing: the specific weight an image or phrase needs to get across to the reader can only come from things remembered.
(Source: awritersruminations)
(via buried-denmark)
” (via 46 Things to Read and See for David Foster Wallace’s 50th Birthday | The Awl)
Including this poem written at age six or seven
(via fuckyeahmanuscripts)
Language has been granted too much power… The ubiquitous puns on ‘matter’ do not, alas, mark a rethinking of the key concepts (materiality and signification) and the relationship between them. Rather, it seems to be symptomatic of the extent to which matters of ‘fact’ (so to speak) have been replaced with matters of signification (no scare quotes here)… representationalism never seems to be able to get any closer to solving the problem it poses because it is caught in the impossibility of stepping outward from its metaphysical starting place. Perhaps it would be better to begin with a different starting point, a different metaphysics.
Karen Barad
‘Words and things’ is the entirely serious title of a problem.
Michel Foucault
