C. Lispector

"Grown up, she was extraordinary-looking, all eyeliner, cheekbones and pout: Gloria Grahame crossed with Sophia Loren. Men fell for her, but she seems to have been above such things."

Arthur, Merlin and love magic

"The role of the romance heroine in healing the knight’s injuries overlaps with her granting him her love, so that at first healing and loving go hand in hand. Only later, as medical knowledge becomes the preserve of university- educated men and female empirics are excluded from practice through professional regulation, does the idea that women literally cure their lovers dissolve into a metaphorical understanding of the beloved as healing the wounds made by Cupid."

The Exasperational Age

The Aspirational Age?

"It is a pessimism, first, about there being any way in which society collectively, acting primarily through the state, can reshape its underlying socio-economic structure. Staggering inequalities of wealth are simply taken to be part of the natural order. Where it used to be said that ‘the poor are always with us,’ eternal existence is now granted to the rich as well."

In need of an analysis

basti: I really like ‘Entourage’...It kills all the magic of movies entirely.

On the surface, this show is like a male-version of ‘Twilight.’ It's all wish-fulfillment. They do whatever they want with no consequences. Except if you really pay attention to it, it has some very interesting themes.It's not clear whether they are intentional or not, though.

Look at the so-called artistic characters. And look at the examples of the movies they create. Like Billy Walsh and ‘Medellin’/‘Queen's Boulevard’. He's just this pretentious prima-donna. He is obsessed with his artistic initegrity, but the movies themselves are just pseudo-intellectual art. The characters talk about how much they want to make great movies, but it's just crass business.

Inter-generational progress?

"In a society of this sort, with stability in both the underlying growth in productivity and the propensity to consume, each succeeding generation must be richer in material terms than its predecessor."