Many silly things are written when celebrities die. One is that you cannot speak ill of the dead. Another is that you cannot mourn for those whom you did not know personally. A variant of this is that visible expressions of grief for those you did not have personal acquaintance with are ersatz, inauthentic, aContinue reading “Why It’s Okay To Mourn, To Cry For, The Passing Of Strangers”
Tag Archives: Marcel Proust
Hermione Lee On Wasting Nothing
The Art of Biography series of interviews at The Paris Review includes the following exchange between Hermione Lee and Louisa Thomas in No. 4: INTERVIEWER This is something you consistently look at—the ways in which a period that is commonly considered a dead period in a writer’s life feeds into their work. I’m thinking especially of Cather and herContinue reading “Hermione Lee On Wasting Nothing”
The Pencil Eraser As Proustian Madeleine
I prepare for classes by reading the texts I have assigned. As I read, on occasion, I make notes in the margins or underline words and sentences. Not too vigorously or extensively, because I still suffer from old scruples and niceties having to do with a fetishistic respect for the printed word; it took meContinue reading “The Pencil Eraser As Proustian Madeleine”
Samir Chopra 