Read more about the article Review: Mircea Cartarescu (2022) Solenoid.
Mircea Cartarescu

Review: Mircea Cartarescu (2022) Solenoid.

Whether literature will save us or not is a poetic question, and the narrator’s prosaic denunciation of its false promises cannot settle the matter one way or another. Towards the end the narrator throws his manuscript into a burning abyss, choosing to save his child with Irina. How then are we left with this lexical arabesque delineating the contours of the possibility space occupied by human consciousness in an indifferent world? Solenoid answers the riddle by positioning itself qua literary work as a noble lie. In successfully reporting the narrator’s choice of the human satisfactions of love and commitment the literary work overcomes its chimerical destiny.

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Read more about the article Review: Blake Bailey (2021) Philip Roth: The Biography, Skyhorse Publishing.
Watercolour portrait by Cain S. Pinto (2022)

Review: Blake Bailey (2021) Philip Roth: The Biography, Skyhorse Publishing.

Blake Bailey's Philip Roth biography has something for everyone: it satisfies the reader who wants to relive the rapture of reading Roth at his best, the literary dilettante who wants to bone up on dinner table banter about notable priapic penpushers, and aspiring heirs to Roth’s ballpoint sceptre.

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David Sedaris’ Tips for Humour Writing

Anybody can be a storyteller and a humourist because interesting things happen to everyone, and there is humour to be found in almost every indignity. “Everything’s funny eventually” says Sedaris, and he must know as he’s able to laugh about having a flexible metal tube inserted into his urethral meatus as part of a medical screening for cancer.

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Read more about the article On Hating Writers but Loving Writing
Amy Hungerford introduces the CEO of Misogyny, David Foster Wallace.

On Hating Writers but Loving Writing

Are some writers so morally unsavoury that their novels, however admirable, are incapable of being lovable? Amy Hungerford, Ruth Fulton Benedict Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, certainly thinks so. In her polemic against Wallace in general, and Infinite Jest in particular, she opines that Wallace’s zealous defence of the length of his doorstop against a condescendingly described Michiko Kakutani’s protestations can only be evidence of his misogyny.

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Read more about the article Have the Artist, the Neuroscientist, or the Art Critic Stolen the Philosopher’s Lunch?
The Critic. Brush pen illustration by Cain S. Pinto.

Have the Artist, the Neuroscientist, or the Art Critic Stolen the Philosopher’s Lunch?

Surveying the squishy underbellies of the artist, the art critic, and the neuroscientist in their capacity as aesthetic theorists it becomes apparent that they are too close to a given art form to take a panoptic view of aesthetic value, have overweening critical predilections that are not susceptible to rational justification, or take an impractically narrow view of what is in fact an incredibly vast and undifferentiated domain of human endeavour. The philosopher of art remains free to remedy these deficiencies in her analyses because she is disposed, and called upon, to rise above the form-specific evaluative standpoints of artists, replace the idiosyncratic judgements of professional critics with rational frameworks that apply across the whole aesthetic domain, and find reliable ways to answer questions not reducible to facts about what goes on in the human body having an aesthetic experience at a given level of resolution. One might cavil that the artist, the critic, and the neuroscientist might themselves take on the role of the philosopher by rising above and remedying the specific deficits of their typical analyses, exemplified in our discussion. Of course, they are welcome to do so. But clearly in doing this they abandon their identity and theoretical precommitments qua artists, critics, or neuroscientists and become philosophers of art themselves. They’ve not stolen the philosopher’s lunch so much as joined her at the buffet.

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