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Use of Imagination
Winifred Gallagher in Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life provides this gem of circumlocution in the interests of anticipating hurdles: Deciding beforehand what you’ll focus on when sticking to your goal becomes difficult can even be a better strategy than … Continue reading
Abstraction, purpose of
It’s a novel meditating on the reader’s relation to the writer. From Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker [M]aybe when you care, terribly, painfully, about the shape of the world, and you desire nothing but absolute, radical change, you protect yourself … Continue reading
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Triplets
Fadi Abou-Rihan in “Affect-Time” posted at The Psychoanalytic Field provides us with an enlightening tricolon: Indeed, there is nothing unitary about the drive, the dream, and the transference; the drive is polymorphous, the dream is overdetermined, and the transference is … Continue reading
Dental Pickings
Arthur Quinn in Figures of Speech: 60 ways to turn a phrase in the section on metonymy provides a Biblical example And I also have given you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and want of bread in all … Continue reading
Dodging Anticipation
William Gibson in this passage from All Tomorrow’s Parties invites us to ponder the nature of design: That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome, the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace. It is … Continue reading
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The Space Between Places
William Gibson in Idoru opens a chapter thus Between stations there was a gray shudder beyond the windows of the silent train. Not as of surfaces rushing past, but as if particulate matter were being vibrated there at some crucial … Continue reading
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Melancholy, Struggle and Book Reading
Gregory Ulmer. Applied Grammatology. The book is perhaps the most charged cathected object in Western civilization, representing, according to Freud’s analysis of his own dream of the botanical monograph, the Mother. Derrida’s frequent allusions to the need for mourning (a … Continue reading
Intimations of Mortality
I am struggling with material from Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I know I want to propose a reversal of old and young in this passage: The young man proudly names his scars for his lover; the old man … Continue reading
Treading
Catherine Bateson. Composing a Life. It is time now to explore the creative potential of interrupted and conflicted lives, where energies are not narrowly focused or permanently pointed toward a single ambition. Theses are not lives without commitment, but rather … Continue reading
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Force of Fiction
The New York Times Book Review, Colm Toibin reviewing a biography of E.M. Forster, July 25, 2010. […] novels should not be honest. They are a pack of lies that are also a set of metaphors; because the lies and … Continue reading
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