Carly

What I mean is that for the writers of this new era, conveying the contents of a thought or even depicting the process of thought itself in language that does not aspire to the visual has the same foreign, baffling aspect as their trying to use a rotary phone. They simply do not know how to write thoughts.

After seeing his German citizenship revoked in 1938 and becoming stateless, Walter Benjamin warned about the use of the state of exception, theorized in modern form by the German jurist Carl Schmitt, as the new norm in which people will gladly live when they feel threatened and are promised a return to an ideal state of things that never existed.... See more

Getting your pages back from her was like getting to the dance floor and seeing your favorite black shirt under the nightclub’s blacklight, all the hair and dust that was always there but invisible to you, now visible.

“Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore.”

Often, the very things we initially find unassuming or odd are what alter us irreversibly. A particular brightness enters your life. It leaves the entire world tinged with evidence of it being there , like a droplet of iodine in the eye, suffusing everything blue.

What I told my students on the first day was that when we call something “ideological” as a slur, we are describing a sin of intensity rather than a sin of kind. I think the works people disparagingly call “ideological” lack this essential contradiction. This necessary element of the social process. That is, only one side gets all the say and gets... See more

Sebald’s project was one of recuperation. That he was in essence trying to recuperate something which could only be recuperated through this particular patterning of fact and fiction, and that only in transcending the boundary between those two domains could he reach across that gap of history and calamity and restore some sense of wholeness to the... See more