Cultural Mavening @boccas - Tumblr Blog

  Over the past three decades, Deborah Eisenberg has produced four short-story collections: Transactions in a Foreign Currency&nb

To me, an objective is to convey the most ethereal possible experience with the greatest possible clarity. To reach in both directions.

So if something’s unclear in the sentence, I’m going to purify it. And I can tell if something’s irrelevant. The world is mysterious, everything that happens is mysterious, and you can’t begin to approach mystery without absolute crystal clarity. Over the clarity of expression I have control. I make the words as amenable to understanding as I possibly can so that the true mysteries can fill up the pages.

Deborah Eisenberg

Art, itself, is inherently subversive. It’s destabilizing. It undermines, rather than reinforces, what you already know and what you already think. It is the opposite of propaganda. It ventures into distant ambiguities, it dismantles the received in your brain and expands and refines what you can experience.

Deborah Eisenberg

But the real fun of writing, for me at least, is the experience of making a set of givens yield. There’s an incredibly inflexible set of instruments—our vocabulary, our grammar, the abstract symbols on paper, the limitations of your own powers of expression. You write something down and it’s awkward, trivial, artificial, approximate. But with effort you can get it to become a little flexible, a little transparent. You can get it to open up, and expose something lurking there beyond the clumsy thing you first put down. When you add a comma or add or subtract a word, and the thing reacts and changes, it’s so exciting that you forget how absolutely terrible writing feels a lot of the time.

Deborah Eisenberg

In 1973, the U.S. Department of Defense started the global positioning system project to enable worldwide geolocation with pinpoint accuracy

In his new book, the writer sought to create “something that was 100 percent pornographic and 100 percent high art.”

#phd research

As perilous and unnerving as things are, any form of political despair at such a moment remains unforgivable.

#phd research

EXCLUSIVE: Take a class with David Foster Wallace. Here's his syllabus, reading list, rules -- and even footnotes

#syllabus #reading list #foster wallace

From Black Lives Matter and #MeToo to school climate strikes, the power of popular movements can no longer be ignored, says journalist and a

Desperately Seeking Susan · LRB 17 March 2005

#sontag

Show the love with likes and comments. Get intimate in private chat. Find out who‘s checking up on you.

It’s easy to forget how unforeseeable the “unforeseeable” really is.

In “The Printing Press as an Agent of Change,” Professor Eisenstein argued that the proliferation of print shops had a seismic effect on civ

Her novels speculated about lab-grown meat, environmental catastrophe, and the diminishment of reproductive autonomy. Does anything shock he

WeWork’s chief risk-taker found a kindred spirit with an open checkbook: SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son. Now he’s walking away from the wreckage w

More than a hundred years ago new technologies transformed the aesthetic field, as painting and sculpture were pressured by photography and

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