Top stories published by Quote Unquote in 2015

“The shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman.” The rhythm of the sentence not only propels the sentence forward, it helps to organize its significant units — its phrases and clauses. The reader is made, not merely to see…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 5, 2015

Not to explain away contradictions, but rather to multiply them

Through the intervention of the Eames Office, IBM began a vast, two-decade-long campaign in the late 1950s to naturalize the computer. This campaign was conducted in multimedia barrage, beginning with exhibitions and…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 5, 2015

On sliminess

At this instant I suddenly understand the snare of the slimy: it is a fluidity which holds me and which comprises me; I can not slide on this slime, all its suction cups hold me back; it can not slide over me, it clings to me like a leech. The sliding however is not simply denied as in the case of the…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 28, 2015

A serious history of co-optation

It is more than a little odd that, in this age of nuance and negotiated readings, we lack a serious history of co-optation, one that understands corporate thought as something other than a cartoon. Co-optation remains something we vilify almost automatically; the…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 16, 2015

Moving information

[Poetry scholar] Marjorie Perloff has coined another term, “moving information,” to signify both the act of pushing language around as well as the act of being emotionally moved by that process. She posits that today’s writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 20, 2015

The essayist and the collector

This teeming or seething quality of the essay obtains both inside and out. The individual text may be worked up on the basis or pretext of anything at all. Michel de Montaigne jumpstarts the genre in the late 16th century by composing essays on the concept of experience, on…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 5, 2015

On changing the world

To think continuously about changing the world is to spend your life looking at what is bad in it. To be attached to the world is to be attached to the world as it is, and not for any reason, because reasons can always be countered. To consider the world from first principles, to think…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 16, 2015

Rewilding

Dubbed Rewilding Europe, the movement takes the old notion of wilderness and turns it inside out. Perhaps it’s true that genuine wilderness can only be destroyed, but new “wilderness,” what the Dutch call “new nature,” can be created. Every year, tens of thousands of acres of economically marginal farmland in…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 19, 2015

Zombie art

When the Hudson surged through Chelsea in late October, at least forty million dollars’ worth of art was destroyed or damaged beyond repair: rendered a total loss, in insurance-company parlance. Such works — those for which the cost of conservation and the subsequent loss in market value are greater than the…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 5, 2015

The postmodern attitude

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her “I love you madly,” because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a…

2016

These were the top 10 stories published by Quote Unquote in 2015. You can also dive into monthly archives for 2015 by using the calendar at the top of this page.

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Quote Unquote

Clips and collected ideas from a life of reading on- and off-screen

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