January 2011
19 posts
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Variations on a Theme: Unrequited Love
By Sarah Zhang
The Magnetic Fields, “I Don’t Want to Get Over You”
“Or I could make a career of being blue
I could dress in black and read Camus,
Smoke clove cigarettes and drink vermouth like I was 17 that would be a scream
But I don’t want to get over you.”
* * *
Unrequited Love: On Heartbreak, Anger, Guilt, Scriptlessness, and Humiliation,...
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But I speak softer, every year a little softer,
...
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The Tourist Sublime
(Image via)
When we travel, the meanings consumerism ascribes to objects become opaque, and the choices we have to make — where to eat, where to go, what to do — can abruptly seem arbitrary, pointless. The ubiquitous marketing discourse that normally serves to orient us instead prompts terror in the midst of plenty. The consumerist bounty ceases to comfort and instead becomes sublime.
By Rob...
The New Optimists
We direct your Sunday morning attention to “The Optimists Book Club,” by John Stoehr in The New Haven Advocate. We’re proud to be included in this esteemed new category of public intellectuals, and delighted to find a reference to TNI’s foundational text, Scott McLemee’s “After the Last Intellectuals.”
“[A]mid the rending of garments over the...
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Lost & Found (4)
Dispatches from the Reanimation Library
Hypnography: A Study in the Therapeutic Use of Hypnotic Painting. Mears, Ainslie. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1957.
The Reanimation Library is a small, independent library based in Brooklyn. It is a collection of books that have fallen out of mainstream circulation. Outdated and discarded, they have been culled from thrift stores,...
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The Art of the Blurb (4)
Both, actually.
From the New Directions Pearl Series. Read more here.
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The Art of the Profile (1)
TNI editor Mary Borkowski, remains as experimental as ever with artistic forms.
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Cyberspace When You're Dead →
theatlantic:
Rob Walker:
Suppose that just after you finish reading this article, you keel over, dead. Perhaps you’re ready for such an eventuality, in that you have prepared a will or made some sort of arrangement for the fate of the worldly goods you leave behind: financial assets, personal effects, belongings likely to have sentimental value to others and artifacts of your life like...
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Open Books: The E-Reader Reads You
(Image via The Heads of State)
E-books promise not a plenitude of ideas and narratives but a wealth of information to better rationalize the unpredictable behavior of readers. E-readers make us into the content.
By Rob Horning
It’s fitting that at the end of this essay about the proliferation of e-readers, Scott McLemee invokes critic Franco Moretti, who has devoted the past decade...
The Power to Choose
At long last, the full text of David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement address is once more free and available online. Read it, please.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and...
