Maya Sundar

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on the atlas — 46

highlights — 33

Early became obsessed with capturing “roundness,” a feature he feels is pronounced in 20th-century films from Polyester (1981) to Muriel’s Wedding (1994). “Big round eyes, a big round face,” he says, cupping his hands along imaginary convex lines. “There’s something goofy and open and sweet about it.”
Let John Early Cook
No, because you have to write the statement of purpose. Yes, the mission statement. Corporate directives where it’s, like, “We’re going to platform this marginalized voice and then their work has to be a perfectly calibrated example of what it means to tell this person’s story.” Then you lose all the mystery.
John Early Is Ready to Go There | The New Yorker
Her ex-colleagues remember it differently. "Of all the people I've recruited to Bain in the 30 years, and this is in the thousands, she is one of the brightest," said Chris Bierly, her mentor at Bain, who called her "other-level intelligent." Still, he said, "she was impatient with learning the job from the bottom up." When she was toying with leaving the industry a few years later, he asked her why. "She said, 'I want to do your job. I just don't wanna do all the jobs in between,'" he recalled. After a year and a half, Emre fled the consulting world and applied for a Ph.D. in English at Yale.…
Book Critic Merve Emre Is the Most Divisive Name in the Literary World
the anxiety of the generalist, which is, “I have to make an argument or explication or interpretation of something, and I don’t have the lexicon or the know-how to do that.”
The Channeler | Anahid Nersessian, Merve Emre | The New York Review of Books
My job as a critic is to present what the object wants to say, or what it may say unintentionally, and then to make a judgment about that. Has the thing been said successfully? Is it interesting? Does it have value? Would I want to hear it said again?
The Channeler | Anahid Nersessian, Merve Emre | The New York Review of Books
People who are art historians specializing in the Renaissance would say, You’re not allowed to write about it because you don’t know anything about that field. I think, Well, I don’t know anything, but—this is to your point about my set of skills—I am what’s called a humanist. I think about art, and I know some things about art.
The Channeler | Anahid Nersessian, Merve Emre | The New York Review of Books
That was something I always found disappointing. I thought, Why is there no room in my everyday life for me to think about Renaissance painting?
The Channeler | Anahid Nersessian, Merve Emre | The New York Review of Books
If you go to graduate school for English Romantic poetry, it’s easy to become pigeonholed as a person who will write about English Romantic poetry for the rest of their natural life. The way that success is determined in the academy basically demands people contract their sphere of interest.
The Channeler | Anahid Nersessian, Merve Emre | The New York Review of Books
two different ways that people who have conventional academic training think about making the turn to nonacademic genres of criticism. One thing that people say is, “I want to take my academic work and make it intelligible to a nonacademic audience.” There are other people who say, “I have a certain set of skills that I’ve spent a lifetime developing, and I will apply those to objects that might not have anything to do with my scholarship but will let me broaden my reach.”
The Channeler | Anahid Nersessian, Merve Emre | The New York Review of Books
because I don’t think a character has any intrinsic value. Every person is intrinsically interesting, but in a novel, what gives a character power is their relation to others, and how those relations change
The Paris Review - Loving the Limitations of the Novel: A Conversation between Sally Rooney and Merve Emre - The Paris Review
Conversations with Friends to Jane Austen’s Emma; Normal People to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda; Beautiful World, Where Are You to Henry James’s The Golden Bowl; and Intermezzo to James Joyce’s Ulysses
The Paris Review - Loving the Limitations of the Novel: A Conversation between Sally Rooney and Merve Emre - The Paris Review
My inflammatory opinion is that names are like dialogue. In realist fiction, dialogue summons a sense of reality without having to engage in one-to-one verisimilitude. It’s a conjuration of a mood, a simulation, a kind of lyric reality. In realistic fiction, dialogue sounds like the way people talk but it isn’t actually the way people talk. There’s a tiny channel between reality and the representation of reality and that channel must be able to carry the reader between those two spaces. No one remembers a character named Ryan. No one remembers a character named Tyler. These are non-names. They…
in which i don't name names - by Brandon - sweater weather
When one character waves and calls her friend Beccs instead of Rebecca or Liz instead of Elizabeth, the author is mashing these two characters together with hungry, desperate intensity, saying Please accept this in lieu of characterization because I used all of my space on backstory and I have no other way of showing they are familiar, here let me add a cheek kiss.
in which i don't name names - by Brandon - sweater weather
In the best short fiction, I’ve found, one can write down a list of verbs as they appear in order and see the story happen there, too, or catalogue all the figurative language and see a message emerge. In a novel these undercurrents can feel wilder, and can hopefully destabilize the reader without that feeling like a loss of control.
The Paris Review - The Toxicity of Female Tokenism: An Interview with Kathleen Alcott - The Paris Review
Dedicated long-term journalling routines. I usually do morning pages and a little check-in at night. Then at the end of every month, I go back and reread all the entries, highlight stuff, and make a master list of “best parts of April 2024.” Then I reread that list, which almost always contains at least 30 items, which is how I remind myself that, on average, something amazing literally happens every day.
DELIA CAI'S LOVE/HATE LIST (XL EDITION)
a hate read is a margin call in the take economy, and without it, our culture would be far poorer.
“The central object of your disgust over these past several weeks has not been external.”
You might think by drinking the Kool-Aid that you’re standing on business, but in fact, the business is standing on you.
“Circus behavior, and everybody is monkey, monkey, monkey, clown.”
But what really makes my breasts ache with rage is the way you people (you, who care about your career too much and treat being a writer as some kind of altruistic personality trait; you who use words like bildungsroman in conversation but cannot identify the difference between prejudice and racism; you men who talk about being allies to third wave feminism but have never once Venmoed a woman back in your life) act.
“Circus behavior, and everybody is monkey, monkey, monkey, clown.”
The fact that ALD—a brand whose whole cinematic universe can be distilled down to “What if we dressed like 9/11 never happened?”—is at the forefront of menswear says a lot about how dire things have gotten and how bereft we are of actual creativity.
“Menswear is … a spindly glory hole that, if you dare jam your dick in, tickles for a second but mostly makes you feel broke and sad”
If you care about fashion, you’re instantly a gorp nerd or a suit guy or a dropcrotched Rick goth or most questionably, someone who pays a monthly fee for access to a menswear Substack that strives for post-irony but instead reads like it’s stippled with blaccent.
“Menswear is … a spindly glory hole that, if you dare jam your dick in, tickles for a second but mostly makes you feel broke and sad”
It’s full of water, but you, on the other hand, feel full of nothing.
“In your search of greater meaning in this Sweetgreenified life, you decide to go to the climbing gym.”
Instead, you can tell React that each user’s profile is conceptually a different profile by giving it an explicit key. Split your component in two and pass a key attribute from the outer component to the inner one:
You Might Not Need an Effect – React
The background is black, as in Zurbarán or Cotán, but Manet is the leading light here.
Shannon Cartier Lucy: The Loo Table – The Brooklyn Rail
In the more recent work, Lucy is less concerned with textures and materiality—the brushwork is thin and only generally descriptive, giving the subjects more agency.
Shannon Cartier Lucy: The Loo Table – The Brooklyn Rail
creamy treatment of the off-white tablecloth and glowing tone recall naturalist art of the late 19th-century, interiors by Nordic artists through Munch or British painters of the Newlyn School
Shannon Cartier Lucy: The Loo Table – The Brooklyn Rail
That is evident, to a degree, but the recent pictures present less pat stories and oppositions, and strong connections to 19th-century European art.
Shannon Cartier Lucy: The Loo Table – The Brooklyn Rail
Its pleasure lies in the gentle blend of hues, the consistent overall tone, the air of non-surrealist inexplicability. This is consistent in these mundane tableaux, in Lucy’s flitting from genre to genre in the same musical key.
Shannon Cartier Lucy: The Loo Table – The Brooklyn Rail
The duality of purpose—a gaming venue and template for visualized fantasies—parallels Lucy’s pictorial and thematic strategies.
Shannon Cartier Lucy: The Loo Table – The Brooklyn Rail
In Girl at the Loo Table (2021), a juvenile version of Lucy cuts some unidentified plated food with a cartoonishly overlarge knife and fork, like a shrunken Alice in Wonderland. She is flanked by two glass vessels holding water that are marked by lovely geometric abstract reflections, as against the straightforwardness of the girl’s depiction. Loo
Shannon Cartier Lucy: The Loo Table – The Brooklyn Rail
The model for the painting, Sophia Cohen, is a friend of Weyant’s, and happens to be an associate director at the gallery. Sophia is also Steve Cohen’s daughter. Of course, museums are filled with portraits of noblemen’s daughters. But, as I gazed at the painting, it seemed that Weyant was saying the quiet part out loud.
How Larry Gagosian Reshaped the Art World | The New Yorker
Afterward, Gagosian and Wood continued to discuss the idea of her joining the gallery, but her reservations were intensifying. “Maybe he’s good at speaking to artists once they’re rich,” she said. “But I’ve never seen him do a really good job building a career from the ground up.”
How Larry Gagosian Reshaped the Art World | The New Yorker
part of it is the constant corrosive decontextualization of platforms like twitter, especially the insular, yes-men-filled circles of tech twitter. a lot of it is the increasing cultural dominance in tech of “business,” or the relentless pursuit of wealth and capital, which can be a powerful and generative incentive force but which i am more and more convinced causes brain rot at its extreme, such that one forgets how to see things beyond their projections into the single flat dimension of “value.” all of this probably happens in every field to some degree, but it’s especially sad when technol…
tech brain - by stephanie - pycnocline
i know that everyone around here has been rejected from at least one thing they were really excited about at some point in the past but that knowledge doesn't make it any easier
the internet, where we all live