Category: Poseur Alert

Poseur Alert

"The basic problem with my love relationships with women is that my standards are so high — and they apply equally to both of us. I seek full-blast mutual intensity, fully fledged mutual acceptance, full-blown mutual flourishing, and fully felt peace and joy with each other. This requires a level of physical attraction, personal adoration, and moral admiration that is hard to find. And it shares a depth of trust and openness for a genuine soul-sharing with a mutual respect for a calling to each other and to others. Does such a woman exist for me? Only God knows and I eagerly await this divine unfolding. Like Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship in Emily Bronte’s remarkable novel Wuthering Heights or Franz Schubert’s tempestuous piano Sonata No. 21 in B flat (D.960) I will not let life or death stand in the way of this sublime and funky love that I crave!" – Cornel West, in his new memoir.

Poseur Alert Nominee

"The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is now Der Book. Hi-tech propogandists tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form of technology; that society would simply be better-off altogether if we euthanized it even as we begin to carry around, like good little Aryans, whole libraries in our pockets, downloaded on the Uber-Kindle," – Alan Kaufman, Evergreen Review.

(Hat tip: Jacobs)

Poseur Alert

“My primary interest was the music. I was struck by the contrast of the two styles – Biden’s and Palin’s – and the music in their voices. Of course I have strong political sentiments, but this is not about my sentiments,” – Curtis Hughes, whose new opera on the Biden-Palin debate premiers in Boston this weekend.

Poseur Alert

"Years from now, when historians reflect on the time we are currently living in, the names Biz Stone and Evan Williams will be referenced side by side with the likes of Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, Philo Farnsworth, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs — because the creation of Twitter by Stone, 35, Williams, 37, and Jack Dorsey, 32, is as significant and paradigm-shifting as the invention of Morse code, the telephone, radio, television or the personal computer," – Ashton Kutcher, Time.

Doesn't Time's 100 Most Influential Crapfest qualify all by its lame, exhausted, imagination-free-magazine-list self?

Awards glossary here. Hat tip: Balko.

Poseur Alert

“When I would see Michael, he and I would stroll arm in arm around Covent Garden singing — poorly, of course — some of the great quintet in the first act of ‘Così Fan Tutte.’ There was in him a hunger for intellectual authority and for a certain degree of social recognition, but it was never about power," – Leon Wieseltier on Michael Ignatieff, as captured by Erich Konigsberg.

Poseur Alert

"Once the words begin to settle into their circumstance in a sentence and decide to make the most of their predicament, they look around and take notice of their neighbors. They seek out affinities, they adapt to each other, they begin to make adjustments in their appearance to try to blend in with each other better and enhance any resemblance. Pretty soon in the writer’s eyes the words in the sentence are all vibrating and destabilizing themselves: no longer solid and immutable, they start to flutter this way and that in playful receptivity, taking into themselves parts of neighboring words, or shedding parts of themselves into the gutter of the page or screen; and in this process of intimate mutation and transformation, the words swap alphabetary vitals and viscera, tiny bits and dabs of their languagey inner and outer natures; the words intermingle and blend and smear and recompose themselves. They begin to take on a similar typographical physique. The phrasing now feels literally all of a piece. The lonely space of the sentence feels colonized. There’s a sumptuousness, a roundedness, a dimensionality to what has emerged. The sentence feels filled in from end to end; there are no vacant segments along its length, no pockets of unperforming or underperforming verbal matter. The words of the sentence have in fact formed a united community," – novelist Gary Lutz.

Poseur Alert

Bono’s new column is truly dreadful. Drezner is holding a contest:

…read Bono’s column and, in 20 words or less, explain its theme in the comments. Here’s my effort: Did you know that I knew Frank Sinatra?"

I like this entry, even though it broke the 20 word rule:

Not only am I a worldwide star and humanitarian, I am–as of now–a great writer–a point I slam home inside–a great many–em dashes. And abrupt. Sentences. Plus, I still drink in Irish pubs–thus–I am cool. Bono cool.

Shut up and sing, as they say. But his lyrics are just as meaningless. I like my occasional U2 as much as anyone, but the words make no sense at all. Ever.