Blanchot (commenting on Priam's supplication of Achilles) says the choice in Homer is violence or speech. In Vergil, in the modern state, our choice is only violence or the silence, whether of Dido or Ajax, imposed upon us by our isolation within the emptiness of our dreams (Milton).

In the last post, I spoke about the difference between King Lear as an abstract idea (what readers want) and the many material copies of King Lear that Google has gathered into its database (what they get). Certainly, the preservationist aspect of the project is impressive.

The subject of my inaugural Arcade post is another new project that I’m undertaking: a study of Victorian religious novels published in the 1880s.

There have been two songs constantly on the radio at the beach in Italy this summer. The first, Bruno Mars’ “The Lazy Song” (“Today I don’t feel like doing anything”), is so annoying that it makes you want to do something, anything, as long as it is violent.

I've been thinking a bunch about free indirect style -- I may try to incorporate this issue into a short talk I'm giving in April. Or not.

At the end of a work of fiction, the ideal reader knows as much as the author. How could it be otherwise? There is nothing else to know.This means that the end of the work is the end of omniscience.

Bloopers are bloopers, but the study of bloopers is Theory. The study of bloopers can also be fun, and should be (even if an air of quasi-tragic resignation in the face of bloopers is the central, melodramatic posture of deconstruction). It can also tell us a little about the ways that we're all essentially essentialists.I am, at any rate.