Steven Shaw > Recent Status Updates

Getting little harder to follow as she introduces "Reflections on Cioran," but the last thing I expected was for John Cage to pop up in this piece.

Near prophesy in this 1967 essay on The Aesthetics of Silence. Highly recommended..."crumbling distinction between public and private endeavors, between information and secrets...people are suffering from a revulsion at any further proliferation of speech and images..."

Her essay on "science and tech" culture at war with "literary and artistic" culture feels quite prescient as we see the former's end-game approach for the taking over the latter.

"A work can come close to Camp, but not make it, because it succeeds."

I really want to watch some Robert Bresson films, now.

Some brutal theatre reviews in part III of the first book.

The strength of her writing—regardless of whether you agree with her opinions—is that her name-checks are almost always followed by a concrete example of how the reference is relevant. How she has found time to not only read the relevant material, but also retrieve perfectly relevant passages while writing decades before easy electronic access is remarkable. Only 700 more pages to go.(!)

For a book of essays critiquing other essays, it's quite enthralling, if at times circuitous. Be sure to read the note and acknowledgements. If nothing else, it is expanding my "to-read" list.

"This mnemonic function explains why every style depends on, and can be analyzed in terms of, some principle of repetition or redundancy." p. 39

"In his confused zig-zag progress--for few animals were now vacant--he worked inward to the center where it was safer, under a roof of banging drums and cymbals..." p. 92

"...I would spend my whole time writing on some obscure theme in the works of James Joyce. I hadn't picked out my theme yet, because I hadn't got round to reading Finnegans Wake,..." (p. 37)

These are wonderful little poems. I could read them again and again, phrasing them differently in my mind, yet still uncertain of their meaning. The scarcity of text is balanced by the capacity for re-reading.

Well researched and balanced overview of Japanese activity in the Micronesian region of the Pacific Ocean. Peattie moves very quickly through 40 years, mostly chronologically, but also thematically. This is a good starting point for further research into more specific points about this period of history.