Steven Shaw’s Reviews > Essays of the 1960s & 70s: Against Interpretation / Styles of Radical Will / On Photography / Illness as Metaphor / Uncollected Essays > Status Update

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."

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