An early example of the literary take-down. Willa Cather on Mark Twain: “He is not a reader nor a thinker nor a man who loves art of any kind.”
Willa Cather on Mark Twain
Like a Child
‘The 4½-foot tall poststructuralist philosopher I live with demonstrates a radical mode of viewership daily. Because of her, and with her, I am able—by moments—to move out of my own natural larval state and experience movies not just as deliverers of entertainment, conveyors of meaning, or objects of aesthetic contemplation, but as pure fields of emotional and sensory intensity, almost like rooms to which one can return.” Dana Stevens on watching movies with, and like, a child.
The Game is the Game
“The appropriate term for what both [David Foster] Wallace and [Roger] Federer did, however, perhaps isn’t synthesis; more apt would be the Hegelian term, aufheben, which can mean a great many things – to lift up, to abolish, to cancel, to suspend, to sublate, to preserve, to transcend – all at once, where two existing terms are abolished, sublated, transcended by way of the orchestration of a collision between them, out of which a new term emerges, which then itself goes in search of a partner with which to collide.” A really fantastic review of David Foster Wallace’s String Theory from 3:AM Magazine.
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Little Libraries that Could
In exciting micro library news, Book Riot reports that the 50,000-th Little Free Library was “planted” on November 4th, doubling the number of Little Libraries in the U.S. a year and a half ago. We’re all in agreement that big libraries are more vital than ever, though, right?
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Quark Winner
Big congrats to Millions staff writer Edan Lepucki whose essay “Reading and Race: On Slavery in Fiction” has come in second for the 3 Quarks Daily Arts & Literature Prize.
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