A detail from Michael Wolf’s Architecture of Density #99 (2007).
By night, Wolf captures light beaming blue, gold and green from apartment-block windows, gracing the concrete boxes with an unexpected cinematic grandeur worthy of great Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai. Indoors, residents go about their business, watching TV, doing the dishes, apparently unaware that their actions [...]
Archive for February, 2009
Banner image: Michael Wolf
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, tagged architecture of density, hong kong, michael wolf on February 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Brain flash
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Philosophy, tagged aphorisms, impact of technology on prose, McLuhanite probe, postmodern koans, shrinking attention spans, twittering on February 24, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Twittering is for people whose attention span is taxed by blogs.
Guilt by Publication
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Glenn Greenwald, Jeffrey Goldberg, Marty Peretz on February 23, 2009 | 8 Comments »
Over at the Atlantic Monthly website, Jeffrey Goldberg is ragging Glenn Greenwald for the sin of publishing in the American Conservative. Goldberg’s argument, not spelled out explicitly but vaguely smeared by implication, seems to go like this: the American Conservative was founded by Pat Buchanan, a well-known anti-Semite; by publishing in TAC Greenwald is making common [...]
Updike and the Begley clan
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, tagged Adam Begley, John Updike, Louis Begley on February 22, 2009 | 2 Comments »
John Updike has long been a bountiful boon to the Begley family. In the early 1950s, Updike and Louis Begley were classmates together at Harvard, both studying English. Updike, of course, went on to become a famous writer. Begley had a long career as a lawyer but took up fiction late in life, starting to publish his first [...]
In Honour of Musa Khankhel
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Asia, Foreign affairs, History, Literature, Media, Personalities, Philosophy, Uncategorized on February 20, 2009 | 4 Comments »
As with all his writing, Kafka’s masterful story Ein Brudermord (A Fratricide) can be read on many levels. Most immediately it is about the inexplicable murder of Wese by Schmar, with the neighbour Pallas a passive observer to the scene; Wese’s wife arrives too late, only to discover her husband is already dead. Yet on a deeper [...]
A garish white light
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Literature, Philosophy, tagged language, meaning, writing on February 16, 2009 | 4 Comments »
There come moments in the lives of writers when the words that they use everyday seem suddenly and wholly inadequate to the tasks to which they have been set. Moments when every turn of phrase, every carefully-planned construction, fails to capture and convey the desired meaning, leaving the writer with a gnawing fear that perhaps [...]
Great Moments in Nepotism
Posted in U.S. Politics, tagged Elliot Abrams, Norman Podhoretz, Sam Munson on February 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
1) In an blog post about the young writer Sam Munson, the New Yorker Observer describes him thus “Mr. Munson, the online editor of neoconservative journal Commentary.” A sentence later we’re told, ” Mr. Munson—who is, incidentally, the grandson of former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz.”
2) In the pages pages of the Jerusalem Post, Ruth Blum Liebowitz (daughter of Norman [...]
International Relations & Romance
Posted in Uncategorized on February 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
What’s the least romantic blog post I’ve come across dealing with Valentine’s Day? I’d have to give the laurel to Stephen Walt, a major theorist in the field of International Relations (IR) and in many ways an estimable, and even brave, writer. Writing for his blog hosted by Foreign Policy, Walt’s post “IR theory for lovers: A valentine’s guide” [...]
Canwest Death Watch
Posted in Media on February 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Reuters has a story about Canwest, the owner of the National Post, being on the verge of bankruptcy. It follows several similar stories in recent months, including a good one in Maclean’s by Duncan Hood that helpfully explains the different reasons for the company’s decline. One reason is mismanagement:
The bigger problem falls under the heading [...]
Banner art
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, tagged candy cigarette, Sally Mann on February 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
A detail from Sally Mann’s Candy Cigarette (1989).
I’m responding with the only vocabulary I have to ordinary and extraordinary situations that I see around me. I have to slap my hands sometimes not to take certain pictures. But the more I look at the life of the children, the more enigmatic and fraught with danger [...]
