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“Marriage, n.: The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.”
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“Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.”
― The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
― The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
“But when you talk about Nabokov and Coover, you’re talking about real geniuses, the writers who weathered real shock and invented this stuff in contemporary fiction. But after the pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank, and little pellets of metafiction come out the other end. The crank-turners capitalize for a while on sheer fashion, and they get their plaudits and grants and buy their IRAs and retire to the Hamptons well out of range of the eventual blast radius. There are some interesting parallels between postmodern crank-turners and what’s happened since post-structural theory took off here in the U.S., why there’s such a big backlash against post-structuralism going on now. It’s the crank-turners fault. I think the crank-turners replaced the critic as the real angel of death as far as literary movements are concerned, now. You get some bona fide artists who come along and really divide by zero and weather some serious shit-storms of shock and ridicule in order to promulgate some really important ideas. Once they triumph, though, and their ideas become legitimate and accepted, the crank-turners and wannabes come running to the machine, and out pour the gray pellets and now the whole thing’s become a hollow form, just another institution of fashion. Take a look at some of the critical-theory Ph.D. dissertations being written now. They’re like de Man and Foucault in the mouth of a dull child. Academia and commercial culture have somehow become these gigantic mechanisms of commodification that drain the weight and color out of even the most radical new advances. It’s a surreal inversion of the death-by-neglect that used to kill off prescient art. Now prescient art suffers death-by acceptance. We love things to death, now. Then we retire to the Hamptons.”
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“Sweater, n. Garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.”
― The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
― The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
“Selfish, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.”
― The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
― The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
— 136 members
— last activity Sep 28, 2018 11:24PM
The blurb asks the questions about Humbert Humbert: "Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is ...more
Nabokov in Three Years
— 23 members
— last activity Oct 08, 2013 11:39PM
This group will be reading Vladimir Nabokov's entire fictional oeuvre (plus his autobiography and two collections of essays) in chronological order. W ...more
The Year of Reading Proust
— 1631 members
— last activity Mar 29, 2025 09:41AM
2013 was the year for reading—or re-reading—Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu or In Search of Lost Time for many of us. However, these th ...more
Publius’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Publius’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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