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Patrick Modiano’s Scene of the Crime bears

this epigraph, How many names have I etched in memory like “dog” or “elephant” or “cow” So long ago now, I recognize them only from afar, even the zebra–and what was it all for? — Rainer Maria Rilke Was hab ich mir für Namen eingeprägt und Hund und Kuh und

fresh from the Mouse vs the Meataxe

the Right Honourable Chris Hipkins vs Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition of New Zealand (wiki) Christopher Luxon played on the television last night, the first of the leaders’ debates for this year’s election, 14 October 2023. It was moderated by 1News Political Editor Jessica Mutch McKay and

Donald Antrim is determined to come to terms, at last, with the ghost of his old man, & other friends and relations

Donald Antrim’s My Eliot, the author’s first novel in more than 20 years, in which our protagonist “Donald Antrim” sits down to read his late father’s treatise on T.S. Eliot, determined to come to terms, at last, with the ghost of his old man … book rights

surplus human sociality as ghost capital

Charles Tonderai Mudede (his name provides the link) uses Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759 to back up the idea it’s not the past that haunts the present but the present haunting the past. The ghosts are from now and matters of sympathetic identification with the figures

& then a chill ran through me at her final metaphor … Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep and, that discourse is not a two-or-more-way conversation. It is One

I’ve been reading Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep: a theology of becoming. I came to it through Clayton Crockett’s Energy and Change (a little about which here). I went to some trouble to get the Keller. It was expensive and appears not to have had a

My father, … [a quote from an Enrique Vila-Matas story, “A Permanent Home,” trans. Margaret Jull Costa]

… who had once believed in many, many things only to end up distrusting all of them, was leaving me with a unique, definitive faith: that of believing in a fiction that one knows to be a fiction, aware that this is all that exists, and that the exquisite truth consists

C[ancel] C[ulchr] C[rime] C[alculator] – the Dederometer

Claire Dederer raises this prospect, a moral calculator, online. The user would enter the name of an artist [for instance, Roman Polanski], whereupon the calculator would assess the heinousness of the crime versus the greatness of the art and spit out a verdict: you could or could not consume the