For me, writing always begins with self-forgiveness. I don’t sit down and rush headlong into the blank page. I make coffee. I put on a song I like. I drink the coffee, listen to the song. I don’t write. Beginning with forgiveness revolutionizes the writing process, returns it being to a journey of creativity rather … More Writing begins with forgiveness
I knew that grandmother when she was in her eighties and nineties, mostly. She was a down to earth, practical person and very old, arthritic, wrinkled but she would look at herself sometimes and say all she really needed was a facelift. Later I saw a picture of her taken in her earlier seventies, before … More La beauté
Staff members told attendees to keep the visits discreet, she says, for fear that their interest in nonacademic careers could hurt their relationship with their faculty advisers. That is from this article, which I feel needs deconstruction. It is very fraught. Should degree programs be changed since not all students become professors? Is it really … More For comment
It appears that Lithuanian is the closest Indo-European language to Sanskrit. There is this Lithuanian film Vortex, very beautiful, that I would rather see in the theatre than at home because of the sadness. Axé.
I dreamed I had inherited a small apartment in Paris, and had been transported to it. I went outside to find out what neighborhood I was in and it was Montmartre. I said, “Well. I did not expect to inherit an apartment in Paris, and had I chosen my own apartment in Paris, I would … More Montmartre
It is difficult concentrate the first time through this manuscript because each poem induces such laughter. If one expects only a few truly bad lines, as is the case with most bad poetry, one may wish to skip ahead in the hope of laughing soon again. But in this collection each line is so bad … More 14 minutes
Ricardo Piglia once pointed out that the apocryphal quotation at the beginning of Domingo Sarmiento’s Facundo (1845) — the French sentence “on ne tue point les idées,” written by Sarmiento on a wall after being attacked by a federalist gang — can be taken as an emblem of Argentine literature in its foundational moment. Not … More Sarmiento du jour
Everyone liked this film, Elena, but I found it entirely too bleak. Had I seen it in Moscow and in Russian, in some art house after reading the papers for several weeks and observing life, I would have found it interesting and stimulating. I would have walked along the street afterwards thinking of the market … More Andrei Zvyagintsev
The work I am doing is not mine, and this greatly irritates me. Axé.
Review of Stanford University It is the most opulent university I have ever visited or expect to visit. It is so beautiful that the mind clears upon entering campus. All the chairs and tables are at a good height, and every room has a view. It has really good scanning and copying services. It also … More Luxe, calme, et volupté
coldhearted scientist وداد 