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“We are in a world in which each one of us comes along with his fixed idea, irreducible to that of his neighbour.” The problem, for Fondane, is universalism. “We don’t want a unanimity of agreement, but a defensive unanimity.” At the gut of Fondane’s argument – whether we want to pin him as a writer, thinker, philosopher or poet – is the claustrophobia innate to our verbal categories when it comes to the industrialisation of original thought.
Dominic Jaeckle reviews Existential Monday and “Cinepoems” & Others by Benjamin Fondane.
The places he visits are the kinds of places that most readers, having read about them and the disappointments and small epiphanies that they give, are unlikely to ever visit themselves. Dyer begins by going to Tahiti in the coloured footsteps of Gauguin; visits the Forbidden City in Beijing; experiences land art projects in American Nowhere; flies to Norway to see, and fail to see, the Northern Lights; fears for his life after realising that he and his wife have picked up an ex-convict on their way to El Paso; makes a pilgrimage to the house, that is no longer the house, of Adorno in LA; and concludes by serenading LA, where he now resides, eating a double-baked croissant with hazelnuts, but with an intimation of mortality.
Leonid Bilmes reviews Geoff Dyer‘s White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World.
The moment of connection is contained and assimilated as one perspective among many, one particular manifestation of a reading and writing practice which Prynne calls ‘almost a discipline’ and Peter Larkin something like ‘an ascesis’, and which has drawn me into a matching practice of my own. I hope it’s high praise to say that these extraordinary poems now feel as radically ordinary as I want my life to be.
By Jack Belloli.
On lonely dark cold Prague winter days all one can do is drink heavily and contemplate their minuscule existence. But my grief was deeper. Two months out of a job, I was beginning to run out of options. My tiny shack of an apartment was falling apart and I didn’t have enough money to pay for electricity or gas next month. With tears fueled by cheap white Australian Bush and self-pity, I suddenly glanced over at the rough dirty-grey brochure I got at the supermarket yesterday, having spent the last 150 crowns on booze and bread, in true Czech starving artist fashion.
New fiction by Katya Luca.
After reading Gellner it’s clearer what the Brexiteers in the UK and Trump in the USA get right, as well as where they go wrong. They get right that some if not all of the important cogs in the advanced industrial machine have become damaged, some seriously and certainly more seriously than those holding the levers of power have let on. And they are right to identify inequality in its many guises as the defining issue. Where they’re in error is in the options they think they have. What they’ve opted for is a confused mix of neoliberal economics plus the exploitation of nativist, ethnic fissures expressed as belligerent and nasty Nationalism. Neither are sensible choices. Both neoliberalism and virulent nationalism are the subject of Gellner’s work. He helps explain why they seem attractive whilst being exactly the wrong sort of medicine.
Gellner gives us a suggestive picture of our current dilemma. ‘The modern industrial machine is like an elephant in a very small boat. Either the boat is built around it so as to accommodate it, or it becomes an absurdity.’
Richard Marshall reads Ernest Gellner on Brexit and Trump.
I agree that science is the best way of understanding the natural world, and therefore that we have reason to believe what the best science tells us about the objects in that world and the relations between them. But this does mean that the natural world is the only thing we can have true beliefs about. The status of material objects such as the desk I am writing on as things that are “real” is a matter of their having physical properties, such as weight, solidity, and spatio-temporal location. In order to be real, such things need not have, in addition to these properties, some further kind of metaphysical existence.
Continuing the End Times series Richard Marshall interviews T.M. Scanlon.
Painting: Mark Manning aka Z
If Agnès Varda’s 1985 movie Vagabond is like any other movie, then it would be Citizen Kane. When you’ve seen both, you see that Varda almost certainly used the structure of Orson Welles’ 1941 movie as a blueprint for her own. Both start with a death, both are an investigation into a life, both end inconclusively.
By Richard Skinner.
The most poignant thought along the drive comes from our narrator, when she relates a story about her driving instructor. He had claimed he’d met the best kisser in the world, but she’d demurred at this, noting that one person alone could not possibly be the best kisser in the world: “It’s like not playing the guitar or something, where you’re alone and you know you’re good at it. It’s not a solitary act. There needs two to be the best.” Here we’re given the symbolic meaning, the interplay between loneliness and companionship, embedded in a concrete, quotidian phenomenon. It’s this kind of philosophical dialogue that drives the first act, and sets up the novel’s overarching symbolism.
Brian Birnbaum reviews I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid.
I want to talk about paragraphs, the shapes paragraphs take in the fiction of some writers I admire, but I probably have to talk first (at least a little) about individual sentences and what goes on in them when a writer is fully awake to their creation. What has struck me is how the writers I return to again and again are uncannily attentive to sound, not just to rhythm and cadence but to the patterns of vowels and consonants. In discussions of prose fiction, we are so accustomed to thinking about plots and characters and themes and such that we often lose sight of the fact that a story proceeds one sentence at a time and that a sentence is ultimately an object, a thing, a layout of language. It took me many years to realize how a sentence in prose can afford the reader many of the pleasures we have been taught to regard as being exclusive to the precincts of poetry.
By Gary Lutz.
Morality is, in my view, the crowning achievement of humanity: in our evolutionary development we made it, as it made us into the cooperative, fair-minded, deeply social species that we are. As a species we are up to morality and justice because we made it up. Many, I suspect, think this demeans morality, just as some Christians think that evolution demeans human dignity. I draw a very different conclusion: what an incredible species we are to invent this way of living together!
Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Jerry Gaus.
Painting: Billy Childish.