Paul Grimstad
Suppose some new, cutting-edge, natural-language-processing app has been designed, for whatever reason, to spit out a plausible imitation of Theodor Adorno. Call it AdornoGPT. One might imagine AdornoGPT surveilling the US cultural landscape of 2024 and saying something like the following…
Gabriel Josipovici
For my fourteenth birthday I was given a copy of the Poems of Shelley in the lovely little World’s Classics edition. This was in Egypt, where I grew up and where the only form of public culture was the Saturday evening open-air film at the Sporting Club, usually a Western or an American musical of the forties. I carried the little book around with me, reading into it at random, and feeling as I did so both exalted and virtuous. This was Poetry, I said to myself, sonorous, beautiful, profound.
Phillis Levin
There’s a man in red shoes across the street
Right now. Moments ago a bird
Hopped from one leaf to another, flew
Zigzag to a different branch still
Within sight…
Francey Russell
Shame is all over Annie Ernaux’s work, and so is philosophy. It is impossible to miss the relentless omnipresence of the former: shame is a title, a topic, a gift, a trap. Shame is the abiding atmosphere that both sustains and splinters the author’s consciousness and her prose. Ernaux is either writing from shame, or of shame, or—more rarely—remarking on shame’s absence: in Getting Lost, a chronicle of a late love affair, Ernaux observes that “for five years I’ve ceased to experience with shame what can be experienced with pleasure and triumph (sexuality, jealousy, class differences).” Only someone otherwise swamped with shame would note such rare relief.
Yet a reader might miss the more flickering presence of philosophy—though philosophy flickers consistently, making an appearance in some form or another in almost every one of her books.
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