Ship Write by Geoff Dyer: “Isolated for one night in a boat overlooking the Thames, Dyer explores representations of reality through the lens of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”
Why we don’t understand Kafka: “‘Impatience led to our expulsion from paradise’, wrote Kafka in one of his aphorisms, 'and impatience stops us returning.’ The besetting sin of the Kafka critic is impatience, the need to locate the mystery and then solve it, as it were, the need to move, like the man in that early story, across the text from beginning to end, not stay with it, savour it, allow it slowly to come into focus. To do this we have first of all to recognize that the best way in to Kafka is not via an idea – Kafka and mysticism, Judaism, the insurance business or the condition of modernity – but via his unique way of approaching his material.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald takes it to the trolls: “Dear Bob: Your letter riled me to such an extent that I’m answering immediatly. Who are all these ‘real people’ who ‘create business and politics’? and of whose approval I should be so covetous? Do you mean grafters who keep sugar in their ware houses so that people have to go without or the cheap-jacks who by bribery and high-school sentiment manage to controll elections.”
Eddie is Gone: The Life and Death of Surf Legend Eddie Aikau: “His life seemed to epitomize the tension between Hawaii’s often-violent struggle against cultural interlopers and the popular image of a lush paradise for western recreation and consumption. Neither tour guide nor separatist, Eddie embodied the oppositional forces of tourism and resistance. Through his friendships, his surfing, and his ill-fated voyage across the ocean in a canoe, Eddie attempted to reconcile Hawaii’s cultural heritage with the aftermath of colonial destruction on the islands.”
On lo-fi auteur and Los Angeles denizen, Ariel Pink: “I really wanted to make the worst thing, the thing that even people who liked bad, terrible musicwouldn’t like, the stuff that people would ignore,always. Something really, really stupid. Somethingthat is destined for failure.”
"Time Travel Back to Los Angeles, Circa 1969“