Justin Wehr

“Every crowd creates an ethic of conduct that is, to an extent, inexplicable. You can see a movie with one audience and they’ll be roaring at the jokes; you can see the same movie at the same time in the same theater the next day and people will be sitting there snarling.”

- The connection between fan and inmate behavior - Grantland

"The hipster moment did not produce artists, but tattoo artists. It did not yield a great literature,..."

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 02:21:00 -0400

“The hipster moment did not produce artists, but tattoo artists. It did not yield a great literature, but it made good use of fonts.”

- What was the Hipster?

Amazon Kindle Most Highlighted Passages

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 00:30:44 -0400

Amazon Kindle Most Highlighted Passages

The Cruel Kings of Carolina Strike Again - The Triangle Blog - Grantland

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 02:45:35 -0400

The Cruel Kings of Carolina Strike Again - The Triangle Blog - Grantland

Shane Ryan on Austin Rivers and why Duke basketball will win the national championship - Grantland

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 02:36:35 -0400

Shane Ryan on Austin Rivers and why Duke basketball will win the national championship - Grantland

Latter-Day Saint

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 02:14:41 -0400

Latter-Day Saint

"Ann Marie can sometimes be found singing in the local hot spots."

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 00:58:36 -0400

“Ann Marie can sometimes be found singing in the local hot spots.”

- Aspen Haus Bed and Breakfast

New goal: Start a B&B; advertise it by noting proclivity to sing in local hot spots.

"For the later Tolstoy, the layers a novelistic character accumulates—vocation, family,..."

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 22:53:58 -0500

“

For the later Tolstoy, the layers a novelistic character accumulates—vocation, family, identity—are things to be discarded. Not, here, a thickening into wisdom but a lightening into humility. Not education, but revelation. Not development, but renunciation: the self stripped to its core.

The self stripped, finally, of itself. Renunciation, passed to the limit, becomes death—or at least indifference to life.

”

- The Renunciation Artist: On Leo Tolstoy | The Nation

"In the midst of life we are in death, the story says, but in the midst of death we are in denial."

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 22:45:52 -0500

“In the midst of life we are in death, the story says, but in the midst of death we are in denial.”

- The Renunciation Artist: On Leo Tolstoy | The Nation

"A high school teacher once asked me to write some satire for the literary magazine. How do you do..."

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 22:36:25 -0500

“A high school teacher once asked me to write some satire for the literary magazine. How do you do that?, I wanted to know. “Oh,” she said, “just write down what happens”—as fine a definition of satire as I’ve come across.”

- The Renunciation Artist: On Leo Tolstoy | The Nation

"any really worthwhile criticism will share the expressive qualities of literature itself. It will be..."

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 02:09:42 -0500

“any really worthwhile criticism will share the expressive qualities of literature itself. It will be personal, because art is personal. It will not be definitive; it will not be universally valid. It will be a product of its times, though it will see beyond those times. It will not satisfy the dean’s desire for accumulable knowledge, the parent’s desire for a marketable skill or the Congressman’s desire for a generation of technologists. All it will do is help us understand who we are, where we came from and where we’re going. Until the literary academy is willing to stand up in public and defend that mission without apology, it will never find its way out of the maze.”

- Adaptation: On Literary Darwinism | The Nation

"science and art are different ways of knowing, equally valid but incommensurate. I can give you a..."

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 02:08:13 -0500

“science and art are different ways of knowing, equally valid but incommensurate. I can give you a scientific explanation of a moonrise, or I can say, with Verlyn Klinkenborg, that the moon rose like “a fat man climbing a ladder.” The first understanding is rational and objective; the second is emotive, experiential, even somatic. Literary Darwinism will point out that the second can itself be explained in scientific terms, since the perception of metaphor is undoubtedly mediated by brain cells and neurotransmitters, just as Lear must have felt a wicked spike in his cortisol levels. In other words, while art is subjective, criticism doesn’t need to be. But it does. The purpose of criticism is to understand the experience of art in experiential terms—in human terms, not numerical ones.”

- Adaptation: On Literary Darwinism | The Nation

"It is not Theory that has prevented literary studies from becoming a positivistic discipline; it is..."

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 02:06:17 -0500

“It is not Theory that has prevented literary studies from becoming a positivistic discipline; it is the nature of literature itself. That interpretation succeeds interpretation in a seemingly endless cycle is not a weakness of criticism but its essential strength. The great works persist because they have the power, in every age, to make us ask the most important questions, which are the ones that have no answers, or rather, that have only personal answers: What are we doing here? What does it feel like to be alive? What should we do with our time on earth?”

- Adaptation: On Literary Darwinism | The Nation

"That so many of the greatest works of literary art—the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy,..."

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 02:04:36 -0500

“That so many of the greatest works of literary art—the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Hamlet, King Lear, Paradise Lost, Faust, Moby-Dick, the novels of Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Woolf and Coetzee—are ultimately concerned not with mate selection or status competition, however seriously they might consider such matters, but with the human place in the cosmos; that such a commitment is precisely what begins to distinguish these works from the kinds of things that are better studied with polling data and cheek swabs; that the finest books demand a criticism that attends to what makes them unique, not what makes them typical: these are not possibilities that literary Darwinism envisions.”

- Adaptation: On Literary Darwinism | The Nation