The Aura of Baby Einstein, the Child, the Toy
If there is no distinction between show and commercial, ethics and entertainment, what kind of distinctions, if any, exists between her imaginary play, her consumer life, and our reality? ...more
Posts Tagged: Walter Benjamin
We Have Met the Maelstrom, and It Is Us: Dean Rader’s Self-Portrait as a Wikipedia Entry
Umbrellas are flimsy shelters from the maelstrom, and Rader keeps going because he can’t stop. ...more
Dread and Magic
Isn’t the crowd itself a kind of anti-literature, an intensely physical impediment to the inwardness required of poetry and prose?
At Lit Hub, Dustin Illingworth writes about literature that theorizes “the crowd,” from Don DeLillo to Ezra Pound and Walter Benjamin, with horror and fascination.
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Paper Trumpets #30: Feeling Disconnected From Nature
[T]he finding, cutting, and pasting process constantly offers me new perspectives on how I see the world around me. ...more
Against Realism
What is it Ferrante has that American fiction lacks? ...more
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Steve Stern
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Steve Stern about his new novel The Pinch, about what it means for Jews to be "people of the book," and how fiction and history can be entwined in entertaining and challenging ways. ...more
Swinging Modern Sounds #60: On Mentorship
In an empirically-preoccupied world, mentorship appears to be unscientific, impossible to quantify, and perhaps even sentimental. ...more
Gratification Be Postponed
Although it never garnered the intellectual prestige reserved for his contemporary Walter Benjamin’s critical zingers, Stefan Zweig’s work has recently enjoyed a revival at the hands of two publishers. Zweig’s legacy is that of a conflicted yet devoted proponent of liberalism, who struggled to understand the function of the humanities in World War II-era Vienna but defended them all the same:
...moreAn idea which does not take on material shape is not necessarily a conquered idea or a false idea; it may represent a need which, though its gratification be postponed, is and remains a need.
Walter Benjamin’s Translation Machine
“The device itself looked for all the world like an Underwood typewriter, at once sleek and erect. In place of the roller carriage, however, rose a stately glass dome, like that on a ticker tape machine (when inverted, the dome stores cunningly in the cavity of the machine).
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