The metaphor of war works from the assumption that there is no consensus, that there never was agreement to begin with.
Captives speaks to Sebald’s call to stick within the register of memory, even if memory has been stripped of its supporting features.
It never reached the level of aesthetic. That’s like a craps shooter talking about his skill with dice. I was just hoping to get lucky.
The questionnaire punctures the bravado of the manifesto, which is such a singular, almost bold, optimistic doctrine or document. The questionnaire allows room for doubt, ambivalence, dissent, and debate.
I read Bolaño first as a general reader, then as a translator, and finally as a critic.
In California belief in the goodness of our state universities is best understood as a civic religion, which makes it difficult when faculty like me and Chris Newfield try to tell the public that its universities have become worse
In colloquial terms we say possession is nine tenths of the law — well the other tenth is reparations.
Nietzsche didn’t walk because he wanted to rest, because he wanted to recover from the fatigue of writing. The only way for him to feel good was to go walking, so he set out into the mountains with notebooks.
There’s an element of bohemianism that speaks to a sense of political futility or at least extreme difficulty of anything like political change. That’s where we are now.
In fact it’s not Michel Houellebecq who interests me, but rather Michel Thomas. It’s the human, not the writer.