Two books to look forward to this summer: George Packer's Unwinding and old Hobsbawm's last collection of essays and pieces. Haven't read Packer but G. Dyer has this quote from one of his books:
"The press redeemed in Baghdad what it had botched in Washington."
Dyer goes on to write, 'reportage, long-form reporting-call it what you will-has left the novel looking superfluous.'
That's a nice idea: zona: how to zone in to the detail but also zone out and see the bigger picture. Also, this desire to 'keep it real' strikes a chord. Experience, life, not art...it seems that large parts of modernity are about just that: the removal of the superfluous, artifice...a return to ordinary living. (By the way, I don't think I can take much more of Cheever's moping around in his journals..it's unhealthy.)
And these lines from a GP article:
'The fetish that surrounds Google Glass or the Dow average grows ever more hysterical as the economic status of the majority of Americans remains flat. When things don’t work in the realm of stuff, people turn to the realm of bits. If the physical world becomes intransigent, you can take refuge in the virtual world, where you can solve problems.'
Listening to Aleksandar Hemon on the radio. Radio, of course, being miles better than anything else. Just the voice and ideas and forget the frills. Hemon's happened to be gravelly, old-world Jewish, world-wise, the type that is devoid of any spiritual pretension. Multiplicity as a way of defying definition (Houdini and all that jazz). Only makes sense if you've actually lived all those lives, otherwise it's just fragments, shells. The desire, the need, to tie the loose threads together, to "intuit unity" is always there. Storytellers and their "&.."..a different kind of unity, perhaps?
Edward Said's last book, the one on Freud, was wonderfully subversive of the notion of a fixed identity, of "origins". You might say that such disruptions are very convenient for the culture of late capitalism, which has to tear up any 'rootedness' to keep things flowing (yeah, I know, a bit general). But that's not such a bad thing, you think, especially if the only alternative is a rigorously defined exclusivity based on ethnicity, gender, religion and class.
What does it take to go to war with someone, to actually hate another person with a vengeance? Is that hatred really a form of self-loathing, a way of escaping from oneself? These are the wrong questions, of course. All that matters is that one does one's best to steer clear from it, and not contribute to the growth of these feelings. Another kind of escape, no doubt, but one that is infinitely preferable.
~~~
An excerpt from Hobs's book
"The press redeemed in Baghdad what it had botched in Washington."
Dyer goes on to write, 'reportage, long-form reporting-call it what you will-has left the novel looking superfluous.'
That's a nice idea: zona: how to zone in to the detail but also zone out and see the bigger picture. Also, this desire to 'keep it real' strikes a chord. Experience, life, not art...it seems that large parts of modernity are about just that: the removal of the superfluous, artifice...a return to ordinary living. (By the way, I don't think I can take much more of Cheever's moping around in his journals..it's unhealthy.)
And these lines from a GP article:
'The fetish that surrounds Google Glass or the Dow average grows ever more hysterical as the economic status of the majority of Americans remains flat. When things don’t work in the realm of stuff, people turn to the realm of bits. If the physical world becomes intransigent, you can take refuge in the virtual world, where you can solve problems.'
Listening to Aleksandar Hemon on the radio. Radio, of course, being miles better than anything else. Just the voice and ideas and forget the frills. Hemon's happened to be gravelly, old-world Jewish, world-wise, the type that is devoid of any spiritual pretension. Multiplicity as a way of defying definition (Houdini and all that jazz). Only makes sense if you've actually lived all those lives, otherwise it's just fragments, shells. The desire, the need, to tie the loose threads together, to "intuit unity" is always there. Storytellers and their "&.."..a different kind of unity, perhaps?
Edward Said's last book, the one on Freud, was wonderfully subversive of the notion of a fixed identity, of "origins". You might say that such disruptions are very convenient for the culture of late capitalism, which has to tear up any 'rootedness' to keep things flowing (yeah, I know, a bit general). But that's not such a bad thing, you think, especially if the only alternative is a rigorously defined exclusivity based on ethnicity, gender, religion and class.
What does it take to go to war with someone, to actually hate another person with a vengeance? Is that hatred really a form of self-loathing, a way of escaping from oneself? These are the wrong questions, of course. All that matters is that one does one's best to steer clear from it, and not contribute to the growth of these feelings. Another kind of escape, no doubt, but one that is infinitely preferable.
~~~
An excerpt from Hobs's book
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