Being slower
Interview with Javier MarÃas, in which he discusses translation and the joys of slow writing: “One of the things I’ve tried to do,” says the Spanish author Javier MarÃas, dragging cheerfully on the latest in a long line of cigarettes in the middle of a Barcelona heatwave, “is to allow to exist, in a novel, […]
Random! Postmodern Bio Blurbs
If there is any word in the English language whose current popularity is profoundly and boringly unrandom, it is “random”. Intellectual after intellectual, from Fredric Jameson to David Harvey and Terry Eagleton, have shown us that the shifts in the structure of the capitalist mode of production following World War II resulted in a new “cultural logic” which reflected those shifts. The upshot was a rejoicing in the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent, the hybrid, the liminal, the accidental, the fragmentary, the part, the border: the random. Randomness and the affirmative cries of “Random!” which accompany it are constitutive aspects of this cultural logic which has been unfurling since the postwar boom. That means that any indulgence in this logic leaves itself open to that once terrifying Enlightenment adjective: “uncritical”.
By Daniel Hartley.