New on the SRB:
Toby Martinon Jimmy Little Anwen Crawfordon Hayley Singer Melanie Walshon (not) publishing data Martin Edmondon the Papunya Tula art movement James Leyon Han Kang Toby Martinon Jimmy Little Anwen Crawfordon Hayley Singer Melanie Walshon (not) publishing data Martin Edmondon the Papunya Tula art movement James Leyon Han Kang
Writers at Work
How is writing made? How are writers made?
From the SRB archives:

Philosophers of Decay: On the Prosaic Art of Dentistry
In the dentist’s chair, mortality is both obviated and underlined by the banality and the intensely personal quality of an experience that has almost no role to play in a narrative, other than to allow the banal and the personal to blunder tastelessly into the foreground. We are held back from platitudes about physical decay. There is simply no point, other than irony, in approaching the dentist with the mythical sense of crossing that grips Woolf as she breaths in the gas. The dentist is the everyday manifestation of our otherness to ourselves or, better put, the rearticulation of that otherness as a facet of the everyday.
One F (in Hofmann) – and U-C-K the Consequences
Reading Hofmann has made me wonder whether I got the business of literary criticism wrong. All that straining, for instance: to find meaning and connections, to locate, link up. Why is it a self-evident good? Or the need to be careful, so careful, as in restrained, measured, fair but also taking care of people’s feelings because it’s the right thing to do and because, a separate point this, people break themselves in half to write their books.
Theoretical Cool
At first blush, what all this tends to suggest, at the very least, is that trends in the humanities are underdetermined by the rational adequacy of the theories at the centre of them. But to say – as I did above – that intellectual fashion reflects ‘cool’ obliges us to specify a little more what that might mean. What exactly is ‘intellectual cool’?