The Point - Issue 32 - Spring 2024
LETTER
“Indeed, we might say that in Knausgaard’s novel the crisis of men reaches its full dialectical self-consciousness.”
- comparing My Struggle novels with the lost men in prestige TV of the early 2000s.
- the battle of the “unlimited” and home, which is “limited” by definition. The self is curtailed.
autobiography of influence
- whoever Nicholson Baker is, it seems like I need to read his work.
- is it possible that changing the font in which I write will make me a better writer? Or break the flow jam?
strength training
- who is Phil Christman? (A UMich English dept lecturer)
- learn about typically masculine hobbies and traits by reading women writers.
- weight lifting is asking the body to do a huge amount in a tiny burst - but getting “swole” is what happens during recovery
- training vs exercise: training is about getting better, smartly increasing resistance to push the boundaries of your capability
zone of influence
- “the specter of a field flatulent with fermenting corpses"
“… density is the strange alchemy by which great art, with the few bits of data that will fit on a page (or on a screen), conveys the pressure of an entire world—of all the innumerable data points that make up reality, which it would be impossible for an artist to include, however long the novel or the film … I think it has to do with super-saturating details with information, so that each detail we see ramifies, suggesting all we don’t see."
- aka Show don’t Tell