Glad I’m not working on this election. The first since 2005 where that’s the case. It seems particularly idiotic.


This, which I saw quoted on Twitter from Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (FWIW I determined the source from here) made me laugh.

It is enough to evoke a face which is familiar to every one of you, that terrible dumb brother of the four Marx brothers, Harpo. Is there anything that poses a question which is more present, more pressing, more absorbing, more disruptive, more nauseating, more calculated to thrust everything that takes place before us into the abyss or void than the face of Harpo Marx…?

Broadly enjoyed this article in the LRB: Get a Real Degree by Elif Batuman.

It’s not a topic which I find particularly interesting and I mean TBH I did skim quite a bit but it does include this…

There is no arguing with taste, and there are doubtless people in the world who enjoy ‘the virtuosity of Butler’s performance of narrative mobility’. To me, such ‘performances’ are symptomatic of the large-scale replacement of books I would want to read by rich, multifaceted explorations whose ‘amazing audacity’ I’m supposed to admire in order not to be some kind of jerk.

which my kids would describe as a “sick burn”.


On the subject of good-bad books (a subject which I was discussing at tedious length just above in the first draft of this post). I’m re-reading The Drowned World. I’ve never reread anything by Ballard before (think the last book of his I read was Miracles of Life just after it came out) and whilst it’s not a dissapointing experience per-se the pleasures that he offers are kind of static, this isn’t the kind of book you revisit at a different stage in your life and find it recast by time and enriched with all sorts of new meaning. The passages of visual description and exposition are what stands out, the plot and characters (such as they are) often comming as unwelcome distractions. Ballard is the archetypal good-bad writer Exhibit a) his books are fantastic, unboundedly creative. Exhibit b) they wouldn’t employ him to run a creative writing retreat.