3,429 words
The reason I believe that Infinite Jest is David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece is that it takes for granted that there is no real reason for him, or really anyone to embrace the mundane horrors of modern life— unless (and he isn’t), you’re willing to defend the transcendent ideal of your people, which if you’re me, or you’re someone like Wallace today, equals the white race. (more…)
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace
3,999 words
Distracted from distraction by distraction.
—T.S. Eliot
Unfortunately, as things are, the festival’s sure to fail. But I have the power to save you guys. Through death I’ll release you from your earthly suffering.
—Unnamed female character from Chainsaw Man, Chapter 196 (more…)
4,208 words
It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you are willing to analyse the physiognomy of others, then the nature of your own face and skull must be put to the test. (more…)
887 words
She was eleven. He pushed his hand into her face and removed the blade, twisting it, and let her drop. It was nothing. Soon enough he was arrested, but in reality he felt he was still in the room. (more…)
4,465 words
When an unsuspecting member of the public waddles into the Royal Academy of the Arts expecting, perhaps, to find some edifying emblem of beauty and power—only to be confronted by the likes of Damien Hirst licking his lips over a decaying ram carcass in a glass box, Grayson Perry in the quasi-paedophile drag of a 13 year old American schoolgirl, and Marina Abramović sitting abstemiously in the same plastic chair for over nine hours—it is perhaps worth asking with him what has happened to modern art, without resorting to insult his however mediocre cultural intelligence. (more…)
2,818 words
In George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), “The Key to All Mythologies” is the name of Edward Casaubon’s doomed academic project, written on the basis that ‘all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed.’ Not only is the project doomed by a scope larger than any one life could contain, but it can also be said to weigh like lead on both the life of Casaubon and on the life of his young bride Dorothea Brooke. (more…)