Rhoda Feng at Artforum:
JONATHAN LETHEM is perhaps best known as a writer of pastiche-driven, omnidirectionally intelligent fiction. His novels include a Chandler-inspired detective story (Gun, with Occasional Music), an academic satire (As She Climbed Across the Table), and a work of entrancing social realism (Fortress of Solitude). His latest book, Cellophane Bricks, arrives at genre-mixing fiction via a slightly different angle. Modestly subtitled “A Life in Visual Culture,” the work is a multivalent, multiform achievement: a portrait of the writer as a young artist, a valentine to Lethem’s artist father, an Aladdin’s cave of allusions. Many of the pieces in the collection were occasioned by artists inviting Lethem to write something to accompany their art or exhibitions. He adhered to a personal rule of responding to these requests with stories, with “scenes and situations and voices, characters and set pieces, sprung from my response to the art.” “Sprung” is key here: There’s a sense, throughout the book, of Lethem cutting his own desire path away from traditional/scholarly approaches to art writing, crafting scenes and situations swagged with idiosyncrasy and refreshingly unburdened by what Nietzsche called a “columbarium of concepts.”
more here.
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I first read “Johnson on Pope” by David Ferry in his 1960 first book, On the Way to the Island. I felt immediately that I had learned something about the art of poetry. Ferry’s poem demonstrated the crucial difference between prose and poetry as vocal: a matter of sound. That limited, technical point had its power.
Because of their tremendous impact in shaping our collective human story, figuring out when, why and how horses became domesticated is a key step toward understanding the world we live in now.
I am not a Wikipedian. I’m an observer. And what I observe is that hardcore Wikipedians – the sort of people who spend their precious summer holidays attending a conference of Wikipedians — are some of the loveliest people I’ve ever met. Which really isn’t a surprise. After all, these are people who spend enormous amounts of spare time researching, editing, discussing, organizing, working on IT, resolving disputes, and doing the many other tasks required to build and run Wikipedia. And they do it all for free. They don’t even get so much as a byline. Or a “thanks” from the billions of people – yes, billions – who benefit from their labours. Their motivations? It’s mostly curiosity, generosity, and community. These are people who absolutely love finding and sharing knowledge. In a word, these people are nerds. I adore them.
The Virtual Sentence is an exercise book for the era of ChatGPT. Its title is indebted to Gilles Deleuze, who uses “virtual” to name a reality that is neither actual (already here), nor potential (not yet here). Said of the sentence, the term points to the articulate alternatives that surround what gets spoken out loud or committed to ink and pixel. This is neither the total space of linguistic possibility, nor the particulars of what you might have said, considered afterward in a spirit of regret, or relief. In other words, the virtual sentence is not concerned with the before or with the after. Rather, it is what you might be saying, even as you say what you actually say, and what you might be hearing, even as you hear what you actually hear—a “might” that is in fact simultaneous with sentence making, surrounding it and making it meaningful. The virtual sentence inhabits a space defined by a kind of immanent syntactic and lexical alterity. What might be otherwise is already there.
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The term ‘REF-able’ is now in common usage in UK universities. “Everyone’s constantly thinking of research in terms of ‘REF-able’ outputs, in terms of ‘REF-able’ impact,” says Richard Watermeyer, a sociologist at the University of Bristol, UK. He is referring to the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), which is meant to happen every seven years and is one of the most intensive systems of academic evaluation in any country. “Its influence is ubiquitous — you can’t escape it,” says Watermeyer. But he and other scholars around the world are concerned about the effects of an extreme audit culture in higher education, one in which researchers’ productivity is continually measured and, in the case of the REF, directly tied to research funding for institutions. Critics say that such systems are having a detrimental effect on staff and, in some cases, are damaging researchers’ mental health and departmental collegiality.
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The central gag of Slough House, the organization, is that the worst spies in London have been thrown together in one building and punished with terrible, useless jobs. When MI5 rookie River Cartwright is sent to Slough House, for example, he’s put to work sorting through garbage he steals from bins. When he asks Jackson Lamb, his boss, what he’s meant to be looking for, Lamb cracks, “The remnants of a once promising career.”
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What is a novel, or any work of art, but the product of its time, of commerce? What is it but another colorful consumer unit, to be slid dutifully on a shelf or hawked through the internet? I’ve been mulling, of late, actions and reactions, the trope of the lone genius and the trope of systems. One held very long in the culture before being defenestrated, in academia at least, over the last several decades. The other is now dominant—at least, among those in the know, those who still analyze literature. In a systems conception, the genius of creation is disregarded and dismissed; no lone spark could truly emerge, no individual could labor, by herself, to write the novels, poems, or plays that endure across the ages, or even get remembered a decade after publication. Christian Lorentzen’s 
But I’d like to turn, at least at the outset, to a consideration of the sheer artistry of Morrison’s film, how even though its pacing is entirely dictated by the inevitable facticity and specificity of the tick-tock of the film’s method (all Morrison has done is to expertly align the time-signatures of a wide array of simultaneously running cameras and then cut in and out amongst them, guiding the viewer’s attention across a shifting grid of all that simultaneity), it is still remarkable how many editorially flecked or at any rate consciously discerned and foregrounded themes nevertheless emerge.