Welcome to Bookmarker!

This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

Source code on GitHub (MIT license).

project/kill-your-heroes

Zadie Smith, Richard M. Rorty, Tony Tulathimutte, Peter Schneider, David Lipsky, George Steiner

blog post about what it means to kill your heroes (treating them as real human beings, with maybe some good ideas)

[...] Pauline Kael has this great thesis about, what's terribly pernicious about a lot of movies, is that they make the bad guys wholly unlike you. They turn them into cartoons. That you can feel superior to. Instead of making you realize that there's part of the villain in all of us. [...]

—p.163 by David Lipsky 7 years, 7 months ago

[...] By comparison, Ezra Pound's cracker-barrel Fascism, the deeply incised anti-Semitism of T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden's call for "the necessary urder" (this time at behest of the left) are thin stuff. It is the sheer weight of Céline's racist vituperations [...]

useful material for my kill-your-heroes post (as background--I don't necessarily agree with his conclusions here)

—p.206 Cat Man (199) by George Steiner 7 years, 6 months ago

The young Eliot could exult only in the perfect truths we glean from certain books in our libraries; the mature Eliot had learned to have sympathy for the stumbling errors of human beings. [...]

this fits perfectly into my theories about being an adult! also into killing your heroes

about George Eliot

—p.32 Middlemarch and Everybody (29) by Zadie Smith 7 years, 6 months ago

Kafka's mind was like that; it went wondrous fast--still, when it came to women, it went no faster than the times allowed. Those who find the personal failures of writers personally offensive will turn from Kafka here, as readers turn from Philip Larkin for similar reasons [...]

—p.64 F. Kafka, Everyman (58) by Zadie Smith 7 years, 6 months ago

Civic courage is not a valid means of evaluating literature: was Kafka the citizen a brave man? Was Goethe, Benn, or Brecht? When has a man like Schirrmacher ever shown any courage? Anyone who invokes this trait must expect to be challenged in turn. [...]

good quote, relevant to my kill-your-heroes post. the rest of this paragraph is about Christa Wolf, whom the author thinks should be reproached as a citizen but lauded as an artist

—p.88 Some People Can Even Sleep Through an Earthquake (66) by Peter Schneider 7 years, 6 months ago

[...] Her efforts to research the housing market crisis ended in page-crumpling fury--credit default swaps? Mortgage-backed securities? Collateralized debt obligations? How could people be moral when morality obliged you to know everything? It was her fault for not studying econ in college, but she'd had so much contempt for the future ibankers that it had seemed principled not to.

Cory. an example of what NOT to do

—p.33 by Tony Tulathimutte 7 years, 3 months ago

[...] Unlike both the orthodox and the postmoderns, I do not think that you can tell much about the worth of a philosopher's views on topics such as truth, objectivity and the possibility of a single vision by discovering his politics, or his irrelevance to politics. So I do not think it counts in favour of Dewey's pragmatic view of truth that he was a fervent social democrat, nor against Heidegger's criticism of Platonic notions of objectivity that he was a Nazi, nor against Derrida's view oflinguistic meaning that his most influential American ally, Paul de Man, wrote a couple of anti-Semitic articles when he was young. The idea that you can evaluate a writer's philosophical views by reference to their political utility seems to me a version of the bad Platonic-Straussian idea that we cannot have justice until philosophers become kings or kings philosophers.

—p.18 Trotsky and the Wild Orchids (3) by Richard M. Rorty 7 years, 3 months ago