Daniel Lomax > Recent Status Updates

Man who has elsewhere defended your right to sell yourself into slavery, complains about "academic freedom" on the grounds the university can't sack the professor once employed. "The odds are against the employer", the libertarian groans.

I now have 1761 words of gripe. This book is a mess.

Because the book's a little too old to have addressed climate change policy, I looked up his writing on it. Besides the bad faith he shows toward the left - unbefitting of somebody who received glowing praise from Hayek - he refers to 1984 as "Orwell (1961), apparently unaware that Orwell died in 1950. I have the impression that the brevity of this book's arguments owes to Block not knowing what he is talking about.

My review of this book is 861 words and counting. I am on page 9 of the book.

Introduction: "Fearlessly, and with logic and trenchant wit, Professor Block rehabilitates and demonstrates the considerable economic merits of such scapegoat occupations as the pimp, the blackmailer, and the slumlord". Aight I'm giving you 200 pages Walter, make it good.

Rereading because Rachel Johnson has made this book, again, centre of a controversy. I missed the dazzling subtlety of Nabokov's comic delivery last time around:

"Rope-skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat down next to me on my bench, on my rack of joy (a nymphet was groping under me for a lost marble) and asked if I had stomachache, the insolent hag."

"I will tear off a few hairs from your cunt and paste them on Boris' chin"

"...almost all Montparnasse is Jewish, or half-Jewish, which is worse." Ouch.

"At times he would fade almost to nothing, and would seem to be little more than a shadow playing in the mist, a dream of himself that could just evaporate and be gone. At other times he seemed to be almost solid and real again."

Been tracing my family tree, and it turns out I'm half-Jewish. Talk about your plot twists.

"He had obliterated not only the world around him, but his own body, and his limbs and trunk seemed like an extension of his mind, disembodied forms whose physical dimensions pressed upon it like a dream's awareness of its own identity."

"Soil, grass, mud, shucking, leaves, hay, cobs, seashells - all that he'd slept on. White cotton sheets had never crossed his mind. He fell in with a groan and the woman helped him pretend he was making love to her and not her bed linen."

"A few cuts of sun break through the roof and walls but once there they are too weak to shift for themselves. Darkness is stronger and swallows them like minnows."

"A few cuts of sun break through the roof and walls but once there they are too weak to shift for themselves. Darkness is stronger and swallows them like minnows"

"For example, there's a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There'll be a whole stack of words stored away just for this purpose."
"Where?"
"In the 'word-memory' section," he said, epexegetically.

"she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that free self was another."

I am in love with this book.

'As though mint sprig in the mouth changed the breath as well as its odor.'

Reminiscences of Flannery O'Connor's (consummate) Everything That Rises Must Converge.

Dipping my toes in the water with trepidation because of Morrison's silly - and, perversely, slight racist - claim that Clinton was the first black president because of his promiscuity and uncertain parentage. But I can already tell from the author's introduction that she knows how to write.

Partly redeemed for saying the New Statesman has declined from serious magazine to a frivolous one.

Question: if listening to an audiobook means I've read the book, does watching a movie mean I've read the screenplay?

Expressing admiration for Bill Clinton. Bad start.

"that Chinese laundryman, who was ahead of his time and had been the first to introduce the country to the millennial practice of the martial arts. But no one had paid any attention when he demonstrated how he could split bricks in twowith his hand and had tried to open his own academy, so he had ended up washing other people's clothes."

It's all "Mich, mich, mich" with Adolf. What about MEIN kampf?!

Taking his father to task for being unable to see things from other people's points of view.

What the fuck are you on about, Nathaniel?

Why is it that Tolstoy's grasp seems to be so much larger than Dickens's — why is it that he seems able to tell you so much more about yourself? It is not that he is more gifted, or even, in the last analysis, more intelligent. It is because he is writing about people who are growing. His characters are struggling to make their souls, whereas Dickens's are already finished and perfect.

"...the parrot, who had managed to learn Spanish although he had not lost his foreign accent..."

"I can't bear the smell of him...Like the farts of a man-eating plant"