But Knausgaard gives us too many facts—or rather, he gives them at the wrong speed. It feels absurd to say as much, but his writing, far from being too slow, is actually way too fast. Nothing, in all the profusion of detail, is lingered over; nothing is given time to settle or sink in. Everything feels hastened through—every scene or dialogue, every description, no matter how verbose—with no effort to explore its implications. I can’t think of another writer in which there is so little implication, so little attempt to draw us in by leaving our imaginations room to operate. One of Knausgaard’s incessant themes is meaninglessness: the meaninglessness of our existence in a modern, desacralized world; the meaninglessness of his existence as he humps his way through middle age. But it’s not surprising that there isn’t any meaning, if you can’t be bothered to look for it….[Zadie] Smith sees Knausgaard’s attention to the world around him as a rebuke to today’s distractibility. But his work is all too typical of our technology-assisted culture. The novel strikes me as a giant selfie, a 3,600-page blogologue. Like mumblecore or reality television, it’s premised on the notion that all you need to do is point your camera at the world and shoot. Like all these genres and more, it tells us that breadth is preferable to depth, that art is best created in a spirit of hurried amateurism, that the only valid subject is the self.
[gallery] eastmanhouse:
Coaldock worker with cigarette, Havana
Dockworker, Havana, 1932
Walker Evans, American, 1903 - 1975
Jim Dow, American, b. 19421933, printed ca. 1971
later gelatin silver contact print by Jim Dow from original negative
Overall: 20.5 x 15.6 cm
National Origin: Cuba
[gallery] ransomcenter:
Two portraits of James Joyce etched on the Ransom Center’s windows show different sides of the writer.
Mind you, I am not in the least ashamed of my advancing age. I am rather proud of it, and I have thought about it with interest for years. I am a convinced agnostic, untrammelled by religious conviction, and the prospect of death, the destination of age, has always fascinated rather than perturbed me. Forty years ago and more, I prepared a gravestone for my beloved Elizabeth and me, on a slab of gray slate that has been waiting ever since among all the jumble under the stairs. Its words provide my first text for this conceptual sermon, and this is what they say, in Welsh and in English:Here are two friends,
Jan & Elizabeth Morris
At the end of one lifeBy this I mean that whatever happens in life, friendship can see you through it; and that, well, you never know, there may be more lives to come. I conceive of those simple lines in the slate, patiently waiting there among the bric-a-brac, as a reassurance for their eventual readers, and as a comradely greeting, too!
[gallery] Kilian Schönberger
[gallery] smithsonianmag:
These 1861 Photos Helped Convince Abraham Lincoln to Preserve Yosemite for the PublicStanford University celebrates the National Park’s 150th anniversary with some retro photos
By Alexa C. Kurzius
Read more and see more images at Smithsonian.com.
[gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19454,19455,19456,19457”]
Mmm… Donuts!Our Galaxy of Images contains a few images from this trade catalog of the Ringer Do-Nut Co. from Minneapolis, MN.
Happy National Donut Day!
