Amit Majmudar
The Importance of Telling a Good Story
You would think that with scientific knowledge expanding ever so exponentially, and literalist interpretations of traditional scriptures undermined east and west by it, you would see a great popular surge away from the old religions, and to the new one.…
Language as an Artistic Medium
Visual art, language, and music fall along a spectrum whose two ends are the “representative” and the “nonrepresentative.” By “representation” I mean of the physical world. Historically, a visual art like painting, from Lascaux to the Impressionists, has been focused…
To Know or not to Know: On Eating Meat
It seems to me the question of “not knowing” or “knowing” about a society-wide horror is not simple binary. It is possible to know enough to want not to know more; and it is possible to cordon off and…
Why Ashbery is So Dull
Those who dislike John Ashbery’s poetry often complain that they “don’t understand it.” As any Ashbery fan will explain, while secretly thinking you a retrogressive muggle, there is nothing to understand in the traditional (read: old-fashioned, outmoded) sense of “meaning.”…
The Literary Critic Considered as an Illuminator of Manuscripts
Of the forms literary criticism can take, the lowest asserts the critic’s taste in reading as a fact about a book; the middle attempts to draw general conclusions about literature itself, or about life or existence or whatever; the highest…
