But if it takes a certain courage to withstand the everyday — the hassles, the lines, the tedium of your job, that recorded voice insisting unconvincingly that your call is very important to us, the Muzak, the stalled subway trains, the car with the dead battery, etc. — surely it takes considerably more courage to refuse to surrender to it, to insist on searching for meaning even at the personal risk of looking ridiculous, perhaps even to insist on a modicum of grace. Enduring the everyday is relatively straightforward — just keep breathing and putting one foot in front of the other — but how to transcend the everyday, in this world neither you nor I have made?
I have always read the work of Gillian Rose with envy. She seems really involved with something, committed to something; there is a position into which she has reasoned herself and with which she must live in accordance. In that sense, she is very unlike run-of-the-mill academics such as myself, ‘poor idiot professors,’ as Žižek calls us, who write on this and then on that, who are pulled in all kinds of directions, and never seem to arrive anywhere.
Lars Iyer on his year of reading philosophy.
“Ideas drive everything. Lars and W.’s biggest fear is that they are cursed with the ability to recognize and appreciate important intellectual contributions, but are unable to make significant contributions of their own. Or — somewhat more poignantly — they fear they’ve actually had their great ideas and forgotten them, or that their great ideas passed in conversation without either of them realizing it. The reader is put in the position of wondering the same thing as he reads. Have I missed the point in all this?”
— Two Brits Stew by Drew Nellins
Tuesday New Release Day!
Geoff Dyer on Andrei Tarkovsky; César Aira on unexpected masterwork; Adam Wilson on paraplegic sex addicts; and Lars Iyer on rat plagues. (You know you want to click.)
