Mas, sobretudo, creio que na vida, por vezes, é importante arriscar-se, para experimentar emoções. Daqui a dez anos, quando for a uma farmácia solicitar um anticoncepcional masculino, observarei sua confecção elegante e me lembrarei de quando o experimentava em mim. Isso também é uma emoção"

Batching is the process of having an extended session of a single activity and then subsequently blocking yourself from doing it for the rest of the day.

“The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the trees, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armour.”

In a peculiar way, the unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind. Thus, the novel can be seen as an exploration of the relationship between inner and outer worlds, a look at how mental landscapes interact with and affect physical landscapes. As Lethem puts it, “as in Kafka, Poe and Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, the essential disturbance resides in an inextricable interplay between inner and outer worlds.”

“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners,” George R. R. Martin said: The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed, and water it.

There needs to be a term for an alternative way of building worlds, the world-building-in-negative that is practiced by Kavan and Abe (and forebears and contemporaries like Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, John Hawkes, and J. G. Ballard). Some have called this process “inferred world-building” or “world-conjuring,” but “world-blocking” may be more apt. The term works in opposing directions to get at the paradox of these types of texts. A “block” is something that obstructs, but is also a unit, like a brick, for building (i.e., “building block”). The verb “to block” means to hinder or hamper, but it also means to plot out the movements of an actor on a stage or movie set. World-blockers, then, build worlds through obstruction; they block out the moves of their world by blocking our full access to them.

Clement of Alexandria suggests that Plato traveled to Heliopolis (a notion that Strabo also held) and was a disciple of the Egyptian priest Sechnuphis. Plutarch adds the detail that Plato sold oil to the Egyptians while in Egypt to offset his travel expenses. And Strabo suggests that Plato and his travel companion courted the favor of the priests of Heliopolis to “let them learn some of the principles of their doctrines.” We find additional accounts of Plato’s sojourn in Egypt in the writings of Diogenes Laertius and Cicero.

um gesto dançado não é só efemeridade pura, mas tem potência de inscrição nos nossos corpos e pode reclamar sua existência tardiamente.

Para mim, a dança tem disso: ela oferece a possibilidade de inventar um corpo, um mundo, um modo de ser específico, que não aqueles que se distribuem por aí, nas centrais de valores globais.

Cada vez que entrava em cena, lembrava o menino escondido, impedido, e expulsava a censura por meio do movimento, pelo gesto e pela força de ser o corpo que queria ser quando vi pela primeira vez o espetáculo. Um corpo descoberto, sem amarras, metamorfose constante e nu de identidade fixa.

Queria fazer parte daquilo, sentir o corpo como disponibilidade aberta, vibrante, exposta.

We live in dangerous times and need dangerous writing. How many pieces do you read that feel dangerous?

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of rereading Reality Hunger is how its most sophisticated and nuanced ideas of the interplay between memoir and reportage, between facts and identity, have been utterly assimilated into everyday life. You don’t need to explain to the alt-right, or to most college students for that matter, that “the illusion of the facts will suffice.” Everyone understands, implicitly and instinctively, that you have your identity first and you make up your facts after.

The American Economic Association, to which Robert Lucas gave his address, was created in 1885, just when economics was starting to define itself as a distinct discipline. At its first meeting, the association’s founders proposed a platform that declared: “The conflict of labour and capital has brought to the front a vast number of social problems whose solution is impossible without the united efforts of church, state and science.” It would be a long path from that beginning to the market evangelism of recent decades.

El inicio en filosofía sería como su gemlen. en el sentido de que la filosofía se desarrolla desde su interior. Otra metáfora que se aplica a la empresa filosófica, además de la botánica. es la de los cimientos, tomada de la ingeniería. Ambas transmiten' la idea de algo que se rige por sí mismo, justa-mente lo que yo buscaba

It’s as if a zone is staked out for a variety of ideas and postures to flex and interact. This zone is the place where the arts play. It is not an apolitical place, it is just not owned by government. In this aesthetic space, the arts explore a less confined politics than the one that controls the state. The state is not the beginning, end, or the reason for this space.

Another bad approach to the arts under extreme conditions is the philosophy of escapism. Transportation via art—film, painting, novel—always has its place. The word ecstasy derives from the idea of standing outside oneself. Ecstatic experiences of art are necessary for our survival. But in times of fear and uncertainty the consumer of art can become a consumerist. In these cases, the viewer binge-watches or loses herself in the visual maze of Instagram for the sheer purpose of erasing herself. This is reasonable but it is not the primary reason why art is necessary. Escapism or ecstasy suggests an abnegation of thought: It renders the critic totally useless.

In his webpage “White Rapper FAQ,” Comedian Aamer Raman describes what exactly makes Azalea offensive: “A white rapper like Iggy Azalea acts out signifiers which the white majority associates with black culture — hyper sexuality, senseless materialism, an obsession with drugs, money and alcohol — as well as adopting clothing, speech and music — as a costume that they can put on and discard at will. It’s a cheap circus act.”

I have stood in such boxlike spaces before, alone with myself, and these moments seem connected to one another in a way I can’t quite specify. It is as though life is a board game, and here is the starting point to which I keep finding myself unexpectedly returned.

she has remained so essentially and naïvely original that “to this day I have no idea what she will do, say, or propose.

Em seu livro L’ordine simbolico della madre (A ordem simbólica da mãe), a filósofa italiana Luisa Muraro argumenta que a relação entre significante e significado é garantida pela presença física e afetiva da mãe.

A comunicação alfabética possui um ritmo que permite ao cérebro uma recepção lenta, sequencial, reversível. São estas as condições da crítica, que a modernidade considera condição essencial da democracia e da racionalidade. Porém, o que significa “crítica”? No sentido etimológico, crítica é a capacidade de distinguir, particularmente, de diferenciar entre a verdade e a falsidade das afirmações. Quando o ritmo da afirmação é acelerado, a possibilidade de interpretação crítica das afirmações reduz-se a um ponto de aniquilamento. McLuhan escreveu que quando a simultaneidade substitui a sequencialidade — ou seja, quando a afirmação se acelera sem limites — a mente perde sua capacidade de discriminação crítica, passando daquela condição a uma neomitológica.

"Houve uma onda da esquerda na América Latina e agora, ao que tudo indica, haverá uma onda conservadora. São processos naturais, a história funciona dentro de ciclos."

what it reveals about the creative process that keeps going on during the living process. How do the two interact? How are they kept separate? Most people are not creative, in the sense that they haven't the drive, confidence or talent to let creativity become a dominant factor in their lives. But they are very curious about those people who do. This easily explains the appeal of literary biography.