10 Comments

Quellenforschung, for the old philologists, stood at the antipodes of aesthetic judgment. This piece gives the lie to it. Bravo!

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i think "the pan" has value in the face of false praise. it's why "The Emperor's New Clothes" is such a popular story.

My favorite "pan" was written by Francine Prose about The Goldfinch. I had started it and found it poorly written after having loved "The Secret History." It was my favorite because she agreed with my contrarian view and she's Francine Prose.

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Read the first review, and did a quick search. Such a book was *actually* published by Penguin Random House?!?!

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Oh dear, you really nailed everything perfectly in your review of Levy’s book. Now what?

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Now I won't try to get it and read it I guess-unlike some other books Sam reviewed

(I know, it's not something that's having worldwide significance))

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"Levy entirely as a creature of ‘discourse,’ showing off her facility with the terms of discourse and trying out different voices through which the discourse might most appreciate her." Killer observation!

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Haven't heard anything about her, but it sounds like Honor is this generation's Rupi Kaur. All hype, no substance. The problem will probably end up being the same: absorbing all that hype won't encourage the writer to get any better.

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That Dachau quote is obscene. I remember learning that readers of Sylvia Plath were upset when she compared her personal suffering to the holocaust, but Levy really takes that type of horrid juvenilia to another extreme.

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Great reviews! Regarding Lefebvre, I picked up a similar unquestioned assumption (that Rawls has solved all ethical dilemmas on a societal level) in Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. But I've never heard a satisfactory Rawlsian response on the question of what to do with the stubbornly large portion of the population who flatly refuse to give up their actual social standing to go behind the veil of ignorance.

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A case in point. Maumee Ohio receives the toxicity report that their raw sewage makes this former farm community/ now all houses for 26 000 non compliant for their population. Council ordinance says individuals all get a lien against their houses until old home sewers are connected to specific sewer lines that divert from the river. This voting cycle they vote to give legal vehicles for some to litigate their way out of responsibility. But to be fair that could only be hardship forbearance, or perhaps some 2 year discount on real estate as long as the owners start downpayments in escroe toward the home sewer upgrades. Standing outside one can only want the city to be iron. Lake Erie is still as toxic with microcystins as when lical water was renderred undrinkable...

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