Death is on offer, on our screens, free of charge. Revolutions everywhere—Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria. I try to formulate my stance on each of them, but I can’t. I want to go out and declare a revolution against something, but I can’t.

In rendering Natalie Portman's character, and her pleasure, so obviously deformed, the film makes her into a particularly monstrous figurehead for an ever wider cultural impulse to psychologize every aberrance, to assign exacting, demystifying vocabulary to all the ways in which a person can be hurt.

There was cruelty in the pits there were

Grace notes connoting invisible
Satisfactions there was a cloud 

Of purple exhaust glittering with

Fossil flowers & the looming 

Silhouettes of yet-to-be evolved birds.

I wish Graywolf’s conception of Critical Hits catered less to publishing’s self-importance. Because by no means is Critical Hits groundbreaking. And that’s okay.

Available responses to constraint (boxes)

1. Reject the structure and rebuild. 

2. Contort the structure, make the hinges creak. 

Either might include building smaller new boxes inside the old box.

Withdrawn into his tower, pacing the crumbling battlements as he waits to be gathered into the artifice of eternity, Coetzee has given himself over fully to arid intellectual games.

This desert basin, here, or volcano crater, there, exist outside language—yet they’ve become places, narrated by discourses of nation, produced through imaginaries of space.

Perhaps the fairest way to judge Tóibín’s success in On James Baldwin is by the same metric he used to judge Baldwin himself, which is style.

Desire renders life like a poem: it collapses space and time, it calls into focus images, sensations, new voices and forms of seeing and saying something.

Hector asked if anyone had run into Gloria. She’d had her last chemo on Friday, he said, which most of us already knew. But no one had seen her since then, all agreeing it was likely she had family in town. And what a marvel it was—I often thought this—knowing the intimate developments of near strangers’ lives. 

Baptize yourself in the promise that every moment might ring with the ecstasy of leftovers fitting just perfectly into a takeout carton.

I’m also an instrument. My wingspan, another measure. I spread my palm beside the grass. What fraction of me is the height of this?

Their analysis lends itself to an intentionally divisive strand of right wing populism that profits from cleaving the white male working-class from a broader multiracial, feminist, and unified working-class—one that might actually have the power to upend capital’s clutches. 

The concept’s opaqueness allowed users to commit neither to the elite circles and institutions that lauded its virtues, nor to the egalitarian sensibilities that insisted creativity was a latent trait evenly distributed across the population.

Perhaps the literary community needs a lot more of the absurd, even in spades, and perhaps especially in relation to economics.

a conceptual shrimp uses its limbs to reshape the reader’s mind, mounding and clefting your mental world until it is the mental world of some other creature: shark, scallop, arthropod boiled down to pure flavor crunch.

What, then, do Jews who are invested both in being in lockstep with the Palestinian struggle and in our Jewish cultural lives do with our Judaism?

Linguists trace the means by which, they say, Black Pittsburghers use language to position themselves relative to, and against, whiteness. The idea that white speech might be made and maintained in order to create racial difference is unexplored.

By the end of the book, we have arrived at the beginning, this introduction to a kind of refractory methodology.

What Mobility offers is a model for centering the personal in a way that amplifies, rather than obfuscates, its political context.