Activity

[...] the abysses in Krasznahorkai are bottomless and not logical. Krasznahorkai often deliberately obscures the referent, so that we have no idea what is motivating the fictions: reading him is a little like seeing a group of people standing in a circle in a town square, apparently warming their h…

[...] Has anyone described the way light changes during the morning better than Hardy does, in his poem 'The Going': 'while I / Saw morning harden upon the wall'? One can see, with the help of these lines, the light becoming more solid, more densely itself; and of course our mornings harden in a di…

Orwell feared what he most desired: the future. But it is easy to gloat over Orwell's contradictions--to point out that he wrote so well about the drabness and horror of totalitarianism because he himself had a tendency to drab omnipotence; or that the great proponent of urban collectivity liked ru…

So the question that hangs over Orwell is the one that always hangs over so many well-heeled revolutionaries: did he want to level up society or level it down? The evidence points to the latter. The real struggle for this puritan masochist, the one that was personal--the one that was, ironically en…

[...] This semi-fictional England, beautifully described in 'The Lion and the Unicorn' and given body in his popular columns, was a rather shabby, stoical, anti-American ideally classless place, devoted to small English pleasures like marmalade and suet pudding and fishing in country ponds, puritan…