The Return of Very Good Paragraphs
To celebrate the return of this steady feature (well, as steady as anything is here), I’ve got two from the 10 Dec 2018 issue of The New Yorker, which is as far as I’m caught up. First up is this bit...
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Came across this one, from one of Kafka’s letters, in the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom: If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist...
View ArticleVery Good Paragraphs – Self-Critique Edition
This bit from Jon Baskin’s NYRB review of Wesley Yang’s The Souls of Yellow Folk left me looking hard at myself and recognizing finally, in words, something I’d felt creeping up on me but not feeling...
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Being Against the Grid Plan
On the 56 Vermonter train out of New York, I put on a movie because everyone in the Quiet Car wanted to deny the fact of their having chosen the Quiet Car, and I chose The Cruise. Perhaps my favorite...
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Very Good Paragraphs – Horny Film Crit Edition
Unlike so many movie stars, Robert Ryan was able to portray a real heterosexual. But Barbara Stanwyck in Clash by Night (1952), seen on Channel 11 at 2 a.m. March 30, 1983, is not impressed. It is...
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Three Translated Paragraphs of Huysmans’s À Rebours
I picked this book up again last night, a favorite from grad school, a germinal novel of French decadence. You may know it as the book that corrupts Dorian Gray halfway through Wilde’s novel. Quick...
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Here’s Jill Lepore—easily becoming my favorite New Yorker staffer—on animals in the 7 Sept 2020 issue. When I talk to students about their short paragraphs, or their understanding that a paragraph...
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From this great essay in The Point on how literature reminds us that liberalism may not be dead but flourishing, even after 2016, in its enduring relationship to failure. The writer, James...
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Okay so these are three paragraphs, but they are in sum one of the wisest things I’ve read about the kinds of knowledge we have, or seek, that we tend too often to forget are so variegated. John...
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