If something is telling me to change my life and that something is not Rainer Maria Rilke, my nose for bullshit is automatically activated.
“against the fleeing to europe industrial complex”, Kate Wagner in her newsletter The Late Review
Submitted by Erin.
He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts.
Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov
Via Jesse Vincent on Bluesky. I recognize that the sentiment “oh look, Nabokov did a perfect sentence” is the “my favorite band is The Beatles” of dorky literary shit, but 1) the context of the sentence in Jesse’s thread is very good and 2) he was just that good, folks, I don’t know what to tell you.
It was an instant and easy obsession with the tones and timbers of her voice, dipping low like a bird gliding above the surface of a lake, only to shoot for the heavens to accent the potential of its otherworldly beauty.
The Dad Rock That Made Me A Woman, Niko Stratis
Submitted by Winston with this runner-up:
The Mountain Goats are one of those cults you don't even notice you are in despite all the meetings.
Much like obscenity, slop can be easier to spot than to define.
“Living the Slop Life”, Emma Goldberg for The New York Times
Were my own imagination struggles to envision justice is in the places where the constraints imposed by all-too-human doctors and politicians give way to the cruder, and no less terrible, constraints of being made of meat.
“Since You’ve Been Gone: The Politics of Hysterectomy and the Impossibility of ‘Choice’”, Lissa Harris for Religion Dispatches
Submitted by isaac.
Unless you’ve developed the ability to fly everywhere, walking is still worthwhile.
“Does Walking Build Muscle, Burn Fat, Or Both?”, Tom Ward for GQ
Mostly perfect out of context and with the assumption it’s being said with a totally straight face.
It is very hard to be objective about pirates.
Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, David Graeber
But because it’s a thrilling way to think with others, to claw back some of the time taken from us daily by tech oligarchs (I have looked at Twitter impulsively several times while writing this pointedly long, difficult sentence), and relearn some of our capacity, atrophied into passivity by algorithms, for aesthetics, a term that arose in modernity to name a storehouse of values in dialectical opposition to those of capitalism: above all, treating texts as ends in themselves rather than as means to productive ends—treating them, that is, as art.
“Close Reading Is For Everyone”, Dan Sinykin for Defector
Then my bed clothes smiled at me with a crooked green mouth and I thought: who am I?
Eurydice, Sarah Ruhl
I’ve now seen three productions of this play as directed by Les Waters: in Berkeley in 2004, off-Broadway in 2007, and off-Broadway again last Friday. The 2007 production had many of the same cast members as the 2004 production and both were very good. I tried to temper my expectations seeing this new production in previews. It was not easy!
Many of the terrific things about this play are already on the page—the set requires “a raining elevator”, the dialogue is poetic and weird but not cloying (a moment that played well on Friday: Orpheus calling a telephone operator in a futile effort to contact Eurydice and saying “no, no last name, it’s not like that”). For the most part the production on Friday did very good work, but I do think the pacing was a little too fast. Some of the funniest and most profound dialogue moved by very quickly, too quickly for it to sit with the audience. One of my absolute favorite lines in the play got no laugh! (The line was “Like potatoes sleeping in the dirt”, which is absolutely itself a perfect sentence!)
Also, because the stage was quite small certain dynamics changed. As I remember it, in the 2004 and 2007 productions the Greek chorus (of stones, the chorus is one of stones) stayed on stage pretty much the whole time in one spot upstage which made their interjections to scenes a bigger deal. There was less room for the stones to hang out on this stage, which meant they came and went and it was never a surprise when they had something to say. I think they did the best they could with the space but I hope the cast remembers to slow down and savor the dialogue a little more in future performances.
The sentence above is delivered by Orpheus, in a letter to Eurydice in the underworld. My previous times seeing this play I was 17 and 20, and I was very much consumed by anticipating the grief of my father’s death (it is a play in large part about memory and grieving one’s father, and at the time my father was losing his memory to Alzheimer’s). So Orpheus was an implementation detail to me; it’s Eurydice’s play and you have to put him in there, I guess. At best, I read him as a device for presenting the idea of being young and stupid and in love more than as his own person experiencing a staggering grief. To be fair, at that time I myself was young and stupid and had been in love mostly in goofy unrequited ways that seemed very important but were largely quite low-risk. Now that I’m old and stupid and have loved and grieved more expansively and my father is dead, I was more patient with Orpheus’ grief in this production. (The father-daughter parts did still make me cry, though—Brian D’Arcy James gave a performance so good that I stopped thinking how funny it was that he also was in the debut production of Shrek The Musical in the title role.)