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On Mircea Cărtărescu
Solenoid’s parasites take us well over the horizon marked out by any kind of realism. In one of Cărtărescu’s odder fantasias, his narrator comes to know a librarian with a messianic vocation: to find a way to communicate with the subject of his obsession, the world of mites, on whose astonishing variety, beauty, and omnipresence at the edges of our attention he soliloquizes at length.
June 5, 2020
It is, at once, 1933 and 1968 and 2020
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No genre is more masculine than the spy story, more impervious to revisionary feminist versions.
Let’s face it: there’s nothing cool about someone else’s sentimentality.
Theory might be most interesting not when it changes the form of fiction, but when it becomes an uneasy part of fiction’s content.
What if a certain neurotic investment is really the source of the best intellectual work?
August 11, 2010
For intellectuals to stake a claim on such things as “attention” or “concentration” is an abdication of our best ground.
To admit to a fondness for, say, the Climax Blues Band is embarrassing in a more complicated way than it would at first seem.
