December 2011
14 posts
The Aporeticus: How to Listen to Jazz →
mills:
Music’s great virtue is its great curse: a listener needs to understand almost nothing of a song’s art, meaning, intent, or contexts to react powerfully to it. The universality of music’s effectiveness is peculiar: people of every conceivable sort have musical preferences they integrate into…
11 Things to Know at 25(ish) →
What you need to know to be a real adult.
The Pump You Pump the Water From
lareviewofbooks:
SVEN BIRKERTS on writer’s block. Image: cc Lisa Jane Persky
When I come upon a bad assonance or a repetition in my sentences, I’m sure I’m floundering in the false. By searching I find the proper expression, which was always the only one, and which is also harmonious. The word is never lacking when one possesses the idea. Is there not, in this precise fitting of parts,...
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
– Henry David Thoreau (via anemochorous)
On The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea by...
Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea was first published in Japanese as Gogo No Eiko in 1963. The novel opens when Fusako, the manager of a luxury merchandise store in a coastal Japanese town, falls in love with a sea worn sailor, Ryuji. Fusako, whose husband has died, is left alone to raise her son, Noboru, a curious, sensitive, introverted child. Noboru is a member...
Jhumpa Lahiri on Brooklyn →