fieldus

from a review of of Judith Thurmans’ New Yorker essay on Leni Riefenstahl:
Time, that is intolerant
of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week,
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons [...]

Zbigniew Herbert
Spinoza’s Bed
IT IS AN amazing thing that our memory best retains images of great philosophers when their lives were coming to an end. Socrates raising the chalice with hemlock to his mouth, Seneca whose veins were opened by a slave (there is a painting of this by Rubens), Descartes roaming cold palace rooms with [...]

from

Excellent interview with Robinson in The Paris Review.

INTERVIEWER
You’ve also written that Americans tend to avoid contemplating larger issues. What is it that we’re afraid of?
ROBINSON
People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in [...]

philosophy, video, magee, dreyfuss, heidegger

Tim Parks: headhunters, pianists - we’re all the same - Telegraph
His work raises the issue of intervention. The translator’s goal is to vanish, to prevent his own identity from influencing the writer/reader interface.
Now in his fifties, Parks says that “whereas 10 years ago I might have offered [...]

High spirits | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Outside its quotation marks, Baudelaire’s argument is nowadays almost impossible to make publicly. But before the statisticians and their nannies eclipse all possibility of praising drunkenness - beyond the prim encomiums to the health benefits of an occasional glass of red wine - it is worth pausing to [...]

Last Night’s TV: Imagine…Doris Lessing – The Hostess And The Alien, BBC1
I approached the film a little warily, nervous that it might settle for the clichés of formidable old age, indifferent to social and cultural convention. I’d reckoned without Doris Lessing, whose entire life seems to have been conducted with a wild daring, and [...]

Book Review - ‘The Drunkard’s Walk,’ by Leonard Mlodinow - Review - NYTimes.com
When statistics are used in a court of law the effect can be just as misleading. Mlodinow recalls the O. J. Simpson trial, in which the prosecution depicted the defendant as an inveterate wife abuser. One of Simpson’s lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, countered with [...]

A nose for Nazis | Comment is free
The truth is that the Fritzl horror reveals precisely nothing about the Austrian people - but the rabid reaction to the Fritzl horror reveals a great deal about the sense of loss, confusion, desperation and chauvinism amongst opinion-formers here at home.
I wonder what Thomas Bernhard would [...]