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Showing posts from September 1, 2013

Extraordinary Discourse 137

Cherrypicked Jawboning All the selections had something in common: a determination by their authors to push the genre into new territory, to feature prose that - to put it quickly - depends more on poetic fragmentation than rhetorical coherence and discontinuous narrative than straightforward self-presentation. The trick, of course, is to employ innovative forms without sacrificing ideas, substance, or urgency. Robert Atwan Foreword The Best American Essays 2011 He [Montaigne] followed himself wherever his attention settled, and his regard was always the same - intent, amused, compassionate, contrarian, and irreversibly eclectic (He could jump from Plato's discourse on the divinatory power of dreams to dinner at a castle - "a confusion" of meats and a clutter of dishes displeases me as much as any other confusion" - and do justice to them both. Jane Kramer Me, Myself, and I Let me raise a battered gold coffee cup to U. U