Hayır, böyle davranmaya alışık değildi, bu yüzden de kendini sinirli ve gergin hissediyordu. Fakat yakınlıklarının daha başında, ressamın kendisinden serbest ve şaşırtıcı aşk gösterileri beklediğini, onunla kendisini her şeyden, her tür kural, utanma ve tutukluktan kurtulmuş, tamamen serbest ve rahat hissetmesini istiyordu. “Hiçbir şey istemiyorum, sadece özgürlüğünü ver bana, kişisel özgürlüğünü, tüm özgürlüğünü!” demek, ressamın […] KUND...| Cafrande Kültür Sanat
“If I didn’t want to compete, I wanted even less to make new rules about what constitutes victory. I would want what everyone else wanted, even if I couldn’t attain it.” - Faye, in Rachel Cusk’s Transit. These sentences, like much of the texts of Outline, Transit, and Kudos, come from the internal monologue of the narrator, Faye. She does not speak them aloud or to other characters; they are private moral commitments within novels about private terrains. Faye’s promised refusal...| Meta is Murder
I’ve been surprised —stupidly— at the seeming resurgence of moralizing in pop culture (on all parts of all spectra) . I once felt that by aesthetic chance, pop culture had stumbled onto the position asserted by my favorite novelist, Milan Kundera: Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understa...| Meta is Murder
I continue my sabbatical from longform criticism as I write my novel, Major Arcana, which I am now serializing on Substack in both text and audio format for paid subscribers. For now, a brief catalogue of my last month’s reading. My weekly Substack newsletter, in addition to other material like the occasional podcast, is always free. I […]| John Pistelli