All bad photos are like, but each good photograph is good in its own way. The bad photos have found their apotheosis on social media, where everybody is a photographer and where we have to suffer through each other’s “photography” the way our forebears endured terrible recitations of poetry after dinner. Behind this dispiriting stream of empty images is what Russians call poshlost: fake emotion, unearned nostalgia. According to Nabokov, poshlost “is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.” He knows us too well.
Michael Costello
21st century
Orson Welles
(via thenewinquiry)
The New Inquiry welcomes our long-awaited 8th (and final) blogger, Teju Cole.
mhm. visual reference.: "Introduction" by Anne Carson
Early one morning words were missing. Before that, words were not. Facts were, faces were. In a good story, Aristotle tells us, everything that happens is pushed by something else. Three old women were bending in the fields. What use is it to question us? they said. Well it shortly became clear…
Everything Afghanistan: Pashto Landay : A form of Afghan poetry
Pashto Landay Anonymous Pashto Couplets Landay are those national couplets in Pashto whose authors are unknown. They can, therefore, be called mirrors which reflect the sentiments and passions of every sensitive pashtoon man and woman. These couplets are sung and enjoyed among lofty…
Marguerite Duras and Xavière Gauthier, from Woman to Woman (1987), tr. Katharine A. Jensen
-alexander gorlizki”
(Source: vancityhamoon)
