Will > Recent Status Updates

Il constate que, souvent, la haine aveugle gomme les différences entre les deux camps antagonistes.

Elle n'était pas malade de sa folie, elle la vivait comme la santé.

Debt is such an immaterial thing, but I feel it in my body. I feel the stress of it. I feel the weight of it.

Why would young people enter a studio art program to becomes teachers and translators, novelists, archivists, and small business owners? Clearly it is because these activities have become so degraded and negligible within the culture that only chance for them to appear is within contemporary art's coded yet infinitely malleable discourse.

Why would young people enter a studio art program to becomes teachers and translators, novelists, archivists, and small business owners? Clearly it is because these activities have become so degraded and negligible within the culture that only chance for them to appear is within contemporary art's coded yet infinitely malleable discourse.

Our general theoretical concept is that young people of our generation are really interested in high-end success – which is great, but they've left this wide-open field for the low-end, the middle ground.

The [Soviet] State became the master. The national element moved from the realm of form to the realm of content; it became what was most central and essential, turning the socialist element into a mere wrapping, a verbal husk, an empty shell.

...thousands of cobalt-colored flies swooped in thousands of wild nosedives, their metallic wings and bodies embroidering an immense tableau vivant made up of constantly shining curves and splashes like the flow of paint in those gigantic Jackson Pollocks.

Religious values, like promises, are pure wishes; like ritual, they speak in the subjunctive mood and tell of what should be.

On and on she'll go, the way she does when she thinks she doesn't understand something and she's scared, and she's taking refuge in scorn and hypercriticality.

"The clear air, the unshadowed light, the women calling to each other, the sounds of their voices mixed with the smell of clothes drying in the sun, all that texture and color swaying in open space. I leaned out the kitchen window with a sense of expectancy I can still taste in my mouth, and that taste is colored a tender and brilliant green."

"il était convaincu qu'il vaut mieux regretter ce qu'on a fait que ce qu'on n'a pas fait." // He was convinced that it was better to regret what you have done than what you haven't.

Benjamin's writing flows so freely that I have to slow down and reread passages to even attempt to understand them. I'm having a lot of fun reading whole paragraphs out loud.

I hope that Benjamin would approve of the translation. If The Task of the Translator is any indication, he definitely would have an opinion. (Also, I need to read Kafka, Leskov, and Proust – and Baudelaire again.)

Ok, this time I'm actually going to read the whole thing cover to cover. Wish me luck!

Bakewell cites Aldous Huxley's Island! I've never seen anyone cite this brilliant anti-Brave New World. Its call to always pay attention to the world surrounding you is so welcome in a book about the wonderful Montaigne.

La sociologie: "cette science destructrice des idées reçues"

The history that underpins the politico-economic analysis in this book is honestly awful so far, especially the sections on China. Some interesting tidbits, but Robinson and Acemoglu clearly haven't read any history written by anyone on the left. It feels like an attempt to get neoliberals to be sympathetic to the developing world. More soon.

I've decided to dedicate a lot of my year to reading about queerness, so if anyone has any recommendations, let me know! I'm looking for narratives/histories from the perspective of every letter of LGBTQIA+ so let's get creative.

There is an overabundance of representation of almost anything and anybody: in commercial as well as social media... While cultural representation of everything is undergoing massive inflation... political representation is not only uneven, it is also less and less relevant.

A new form of storytelling using emojis and tweeted rape threats is both creating and tearing apart communities loosely linked by shared attention deficit.

Donner un titre aux moments de sa vie, comme on le fait à l'école pour des passages littéraires, est peut-être un moyen de la maîtriser ?

Pacifists today oppose the tendency toward war, in other words the war for preparation for war... They oppose peace as war.

"Et puis, on est mère pour comprendre l’inexplicable. On est mère pour illuminer les ténèbres. On est mère pour couver, quand les éclairs zèbrent la nuit, quand la tonnerre viole la terre, quand la boue enlise. On est mère pour aimer, sans commencement ni fin."

"L’amitié a des grandeurs inconnues de l'amour. Elle se fortifie dans les difficultés, alors que les contraintes massacrent l'amour. Elle résiste au temps qui lasse et désunit les couples. Elle a des élévations inconnues de l'amour."

"l’Occident s’est sacrifié en tant que civilisation particulière pour s’imposer comme culture universelle. L’opération se résume ainsi: une entité à l’agonie se sacrifie comme contenu pour se survivre en tant que forme."

Idée intéressante

"Le nouvel ascétisme bio est le contrôle de soi qui est requis de tous pour négocier l’opération de sauvetage à quoi le système s’est lui-même acculé. C’est au nom de l’écologie qu’il faudra désormais se serrer la ceinture, comme hier au nom de l’économie."

^ C'est pourquoi il faut toujours interroger les entreprises vertes.

Les forces armées ne s’adaptent pas seulement à la métropole, elles la façonnent.