May 2013
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Lost in translation
On what it means when translators introduce words they think should be in the original text, but aren’t:
In Lawrence’s Women in Love Ursula reflects that she’s not even tempted to get married. Her sister Gudrun agrees and carries on, “Isn’t it an amazing thing … how strong the temptation is, not to!” Lawrence comments: “They both laughed, looking at each other. In their hearts they were...
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"A Lot of Sorrow" -- The National at MoMA PS1
After four hours and fifty-five minutes, Matt Berninger, the lead vocalist of The National, decided to have some fun. “Sorrow found me when I was young / Sorrow waited, Sorrow won,” he raced through the first two lines of the lyrics like a record out of whack, then paused and smiled.
If his voice sounded slightly hoarse, it was hard to blame him. The National was taking part in a grueling...
April 2013
9 posts
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My review of James Lasdun's "Give Me Everything...
How does one write about obsessive love? Well, if “Lolita,” “The Kreutzer Sonata” and “Wuthering Heights” are to be any kind of guide, then the answer is: Magnificently. But what if our focus is not on the Humbert Humberts, the Pozdnyshevs, the Heathcliffs of our world? What if our narrator is not the one obsessed but is rather the object of obsession? And what if the nightmarish events that he...
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If Jill Abramson were a man... →
annfriedman:
She’s a source of widespread frustration and anxiety who is demoralizing, uncaring, morale-draining, and very unpopular. He demands excellence and relevance.
She is difficult to work with, unreasonable, impossible, stubborn. He has a strong vision and insists on seeing it carried out.
She is AWOL and disengaged. He attended Sundance and SXSW.
She is not a naturally charismatic...
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“I’d been listening to men talk since I arrived in New York City. That’s what men...”
– The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner.
And here’s James Wood, beautifully describing the book as “scintillatingly alive, and also alive to artifice. It ripples with stories, anecdotes, set-piece monologues, crafty egotistical tall tales, and hapless adventures: Kushner is never not...
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Renata Adler and David Shields at the Strand
On a finally-not-freezing Friday night at the Strand bookstore, off New York’s Union Square, a few dozen people piled into the “Rare Books” section on the store’s secreted third floor. With cloth-bound books, leather armchairs, and warm uncirculated air, the “Rare Books” floor looks exactly like you would expect – that is to say, like your grandparents’ living room.
The occasion was a...
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“Men are all in the light always: with women you swim at once into the silent...”
– Virginia Woolf, in a letter to a friend. Other writers’ correspondences in this lovely essay.
March 2013
13 posts
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“Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond are not the “stars” of the...”
– On the slanted reporting of the Steubenville rape verdict.
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No Expectations
On July 7, 2010, a day after he met in Washington with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Obama sat down for his first-ever interview on Israeli television. The first question he was asked by Yonit Levy, Channel 2’s seasoned and striking news anchor, was whether he was hopeful of getting a peace process underway. “Being hopeful is not the same as being blindly optimistic,”...
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“It has never been easier to be a writer; and it has never been harder to be a...”
– Adam Gopnik on writing today: http://nyr.kr/ZFRu7k (via newyorker)
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February 2013
12 posts
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““We’ve all done it,” begins one of the spicier dialogues in the new...”
– Great essay on Hollywood’s stereotype of female journalists.
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“You emptied the top rack of the dishwasher but not the bottom, so the clean...”
– Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs.
(Which I finally got around to reading. And loving.)
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“I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want...”
– Joan Didion in this resurfaced 1977 interview. I’ve wondered lately how writers deal with self disappointment. That’s an elegant an answer as any I’d seen.
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Lines from Shakespeare Mistaken for 1990s Hip Hop... →
“I’ll teach you how to flow.” (The Tempest)
“He speaks plain cannon fire, and smoke and bounce.” (King John)
“I have within my mind / A thousand raw tricks of these bragging Jacks, / Which I will practise.” (The Merchant of Venice)
“That’s an ill phrase.” (Hamlet)
“Holla, holla!” (King Lear) “I am the dog: no, the dog is himself, and I am the dog–Oh! the dog is me, and I am myself.” (The...
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Demonizing? Not really...
In the Israeli-Palestinian public relations wars, it’s conventional wisdom that the textbooks used in schools in the West Bank and Gaza breed hatred for Israel. “They have textbooks that say, ‘If there are 13 Jews and nine Jews are killed, how many Jews are left?” Newt Gingrich said when he was running for the Republican presidential nomination. “These textbooks don’t give Palestinian...
January 2013
14 posts
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Why the Israeli left is lost
The first election I clearly remember as a child growing up in Jerusalem was that of 1992. Israel had only two television channels back then—one of which aired infomercials on a loop—so being allowed to stay up late to watch the returns that night was mesmerizing: It ingrained politics in my mind as the best show in town. The climax of a drawn-out ideological feud between two Yitzhaks (Shamir...
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