Writing
fromVulture
1 day agoBen Lerner's Big Feelings
Ben Lerner's new book, Transcription, explores the complexities of authorial voice and the nature of interviews through a unique narrative structure.
On this site birthed in 1963 lays lain layed lies the location original whereabouts around here of the Berkeley Copywriter's Guild, A place where word geeks were often found with their smug understanding of grammar and their tiny worn-down blue pencils marking up all the fun words for boring ones.
Howard Jacobson writes characters at their wits' end; those characters are usually men, and those men are usually Jewish. Additionally, and problematically for both them and everyone around them, their collective wits are capacious: easily enlarged to allow idiosyncrasy to bloom into neurosis, preoccupation into obsession.
Dilara, the protagonist of this début novel, is consumed by the absence of a stable home in her life. She and her family flee Turkey, where she is from, after a failed coup in 2016. When they end up in Italy, something inexplicable happens: Dilara's bathroom transforms into a cell in an infamous prison on the outskirts of Istanbul.
For Lowell There are things which, said and true, are of this generation's past; of fighting freedom's battles and of taking off the mask- stories of the actions taken, to blot out the blights of sin, how heroes and the valorous fought their enemies within, Would we be traitors to our bugle, which beckons with its call? - They won freedom for their people but in fine print said: be damned.
What I mean is that 'religion' was the way the classical sociologists like like Emil Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber first managed to turn 'society' into something you could actually study. Durkheim's Elementary Forms defines religion as a system of beliefs and practices tied to sacred things, and what matters there is how those beliefs and rituals bind people together into a moral community-the church. For him, the believer isn't wrong to think he depends on a higher power.
On this week's episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with his reflections on the recent shootings in Minneapolis. He argues that these killings, alongside ICE's warrantless home raids and mistaken detentions, and the reports of deaths in custody, are not isolated abuses but signs of a rapidly deepening crisis in American democracy, one in which basic rights and due process are applied unevenly and increasingly contested.
It was once commonly understood that fiction was in the wisdom business, that it offered not only aesthetic pleasure but also moral improvement. This function of literature was not tough to spot. One of the first English novels was Samuel Richardson's 1740 work, Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded-a title not meant ironically. Through the 19th century, many authors turned directly to the reader with philosophical and social (if sometimes ironic) commentary: "It is a truth universally acknowledged"; "It was the best of times"; "All happy families are alike." For readers not up to the challenge of full George Eliot novels, her enterprising publisher compiled a volume of Eliot's many Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings, in order to more broadly distribute "a morality as pure as it is impassioned."